The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

Starred review from August 30, 2010
The 20 short stories in the 14th edition of this "best of" series offer a wider variety than some of its predecessors. Sherlockians who have not yet encountered Lyndsay Faye will be more than pleased by her pastiche, "The Case of Colonel Warburton's Madness," which allows the sleuth to solve the mystery from an armchair. Jay Brandon makes clever use of his research into the history of San Antonio in "A Jury of His Peers," which centers on the Mexican Army's expulsion of all of the city's attorneys in 1842. Lynda Leidiger's "Tell Me" movingly portrays the horrific aftermath of a rape and attempted murder. Doug Alleyn's "An Early Christmas" proves that excellent traditional whodunits, which have been underrepresented in recent years, are still being written. Other contributors include Dennis Lehane, Phillip Margolin, and Jon Land. While this volume contains relatively few household names, the quality certainly doesn't suffer as a result.

Starred review from August 29, 2011
The excellent 15th edition of this “best of” series, edited by mystery maven Otto Penzler, contains 20 winning short stories, many by relative unknowns. Among the standouts are Brendan Dubois’s “Ride-Along,” in which a veteran cop and a freelance reporter get involved in a robbery, and Beth Ann Fennelly and Tom Franklin’s “What His Hands Had Been Waiting For,” in which the struggle for survival in the Mississippi Delta during the terrible 1927 flood takes a strange turn. In Ed Gorman’s memorable “Flying Solo,” two old men dying of cancer make the most of their last days. As in previous volumes, it’s hard to find lighter fare, but S.J. Rozan’s clever “Chin Yong-Yun Takes a Case” is a beautifully crafted and satisfying tale of amateur detection. Other contributors include such pros as Lawrence Block, Loren D. Estleman, and Mickey Spillane and Max Collins.