One of the better story collections I have read in recent years.

I have to say that I was impressed with this from the start including the intro by Louise Penny. A number of these stories are not what I would think of as traditional mystery stories (there are plenty of those too), but mystery stories can encompass a lot of things. There are old tropes here wearing new clothes, but that is fine with me when it is done very well. I have never been a fan of Joyce Carol Oates scary stories and the one here ... young women going off to college and dying is not what I ever want to read about.

There are numerous excellent stories in here by excellent writers, Here's a breakdown:

1. Banana Triangle Six by Louis Bayard, 4+ stars, orig from Ellery Queen's Mystery Mag
- This one could almost be too scary real
2. Y is For Yangchuan Lizard by Andrew Bourelle, 4 1/2 stars, from an anthology D is For Dinosaur
- A triple cross drug deal for the rarest drug of all.
3. The Designee by T C Boyle, 3+ stars
- all too believable story of how one of those Nigerian type let's scam the elderly things plays out
4. Smoked by Michael Bracken, 4+ stars
- Motorcycle gang comes for vengeance. One of my favorites from this collection.
5. The Wild Side of Life by James Lee Burke, 4 stars
- I liked this dark bayou type tale
6. Too Much Time by Lee Child, 4 1/2 stars
- Another one of my favorites of the collection, a multilayered Reacher novella that keeps the reader guessing
7. The Third Panel by Michael Connelly, 5 stars
- a great short piece playing off the artwork of H Bosch
8. Gun Work, by John M. Floyd, 5 stars
- a very good story set near Dodge in the old west where a former gunman, now a PI, is tasked with solving a mystery from over 20 years before.
9. Cabin Fever by David Edgerley Gates, 4 stars
- The start of this story lets you know it will be one tense, nail biting ride. A deputy is stranded in the Montana wilderness when his truck breaks down. Two escaped extremely deadly cons are on the loose, unknown to the deputy. Not a terribly original idea but you can read a story like this and it can go many different ways. The dialog gets a little confusing with a few too many actors in such a short story. Good though.
10. Small Signs by Charlaine Harris, 2 - 2 1/2 stars
- Almost my least favorite story
11. Takeout by Rob Hart, 2 1/2 stars
- Sub-par story for this collection, a gambler in New York is being manipulated by a 'friend' and the chinese mob
12. Death in the Serengeti by David H Hendrickson, 3 1/2 stars
- Not good to be a game warden when the rhino and elephant poachers are at war with you.
13. All Our Yesterdays by Andrew Klavan, 3 stars
- a WWI English soldier is sent home to recover after being very badly hurt and runs headlong into a slasher horror story not of his making. Rather unbelievable.
14. PX Christmas by Martin Limon, 3 stars
- Bad things happen to the Korean wife of a GI in Seoul in the 1970s.
15. Windward by Paul D. Marks, 3 1/2 stars
- unlike some of the stories here, this one was a mystery to be solved. Begins in Venice Beach, California. PI is hired to find a missing wife. The mystery gets solved.
16. Phantomwize: 1972 by Joyce Carol Oates 1 1/2 stars
- Death of a co-ed. Claustrophobic, trying to be stylish, yet dull, too drawn out maybe, and the creepy subject of 'seduction' by the professor is not my cuppa. Skimmed sections. I'll confess to not liking Oates.
17. Rule Number One by Alan Orloff, 2 1/2 stars
- a triple cross and then a double cross on top - but a bland thing all around
18. The Apex Predator by William Dylan Powell, 2+ stars
- sigh
19. Waiting on Joe by Scott Loring Sanders, 3 stars
- not a good marriage for Steven and Deborah
20. Breadfruit by Brian Silverman, 3 1/2 stars
- to the island, an imaginary St. Pierre in the Caribbean. It is a lovely place for a new life until the drug smuggler comes.

The 20 stories here appear alphabetically by the author's last name but somehow I liked the first 9 stories much more than those that came after. Strange, that. By the time I finished this I was tired of "mystery" short stories! ( )

As usual these are mostly not really mystery stories so much as crime stories, for the most part. The Reacher story is great, as is Connolly's entry; those are the ones I pick these up for. "Breadfruit" was also very good. Most of the rest are, you know, fine. "Waiting on Joe" contains animal cruelty, as it seems at least one story in every Best American anthology by law must, so if that's not your jam, you can skip that one, and you won't miss anything. ( )

What an entertaining collection this is! The stories cover a wide range of mystery/crime/suspense writing, with a fair bit of edge. Edited by Louise Penny from a collection assembled under the direction of Otto Penzler, the twenty stories, all published in the past year, first appeared in US crime magazines, in literary magazines, in themed anthologies, and in single-author collections by T.C. Boyle, Lee Child, Scott Loring Sanders).
Says editor Penny, “A great short story is like a great poem. Crystalline in clarity. Each word with purpose. Lean, muscular, graceful. Nothing wasted. A brilliant marriage of intellect, rational thought, and creativity.” This edition underscores her point on every page.
Though most of the stories run to about twenty pages, Lee Child, with “Too Much Time,” doubles that length. He meticulously describes how the redoubtable Jack Reacher digs himself in deeper and deeper with Maine police while all the time working on an unexpected (by this reader) solution to his precarious situation. Joyce Carol Oates also provides a near-novella with “Phantomwise: 1972,” about a naïve college coed who makes consistently bad choices and the men who exploit them.
Most of the stories take place in the good old US of A, from the sketchy surrounds of Paul Marks’s Venice Beach (“Windward”) to James Lee Burke’s Cajun country (“The Wild Side of Life”), though a few are set in more exotic climes: Africa in David H. Hendrickson’s Derringer-winning “Death in the Serengeti,” the tropical and fictional island of St. Pierre (“Breadfruit” by Brian Silverman), and the Republic of Korea (“PX Christmas” by Martin Limón).
The selected authors found clever and creative ways to deploy the staple characters of crime fiction—unfaithful wives (“Waiting on Joe” by Scott Loring Sanders), assassins (“Takeout” by Rob Hart) and serial killers (“All Our Yesterdays” by Andrew Klavan). They deal with classic crime situations too: trying to escape a difficult past (“Smoked” by Michael Bracken and “Gun Work” by John M. Floyd) or the long tail of a super-secret job (“Small Signs” by Charlaine Harris); prison breaks (“Cabin Fever” by David Edgerley Gates), and the double or is it triple? cross (“Y is for Yangchuan Lizard” by Andrew Bourelle and “Rule Number One” by Alan Orloff).
A couple of the scams were so deftly described that you may find yourself grinning with the vigilante surprise of Michael Connelly’s “The Third Panel” and the flim-flamming of an elderly man in TC Boyle’s “The Designee,” in which you must decide how complicit the elderly “victim” is. It’s the best story of his I’ve ever read. There’s also a thought-provoking twist in “Banana Triangle Six” by Louis Bayard.
This talented collection of authors fills their stories with great lines, though one of my favorites comes from “The Apex Predator,” by William Dylan Powell, wherein the main character claims he learned in Uncle Sam’s navy the “most useful tactical skill ever developed by humankind—and it’s not swimming or fighting or tying knots. It’s the art of bullshitting someone so you don’t get in trouble.”
If you’ve been glancing over the author names looking for (and finding) many that are familiar, you may also have noticed the near-absence of women authors. Joyce Carol Oates who has more than a hundred published books is not a surprise in this list, nor is Charlaine Harris, who’s been publishing mystery fiction since 1981. It’s a real mystery why no other accomplished, newer authors appear here. Women are somewhat more prominent in the list of “Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2017” at the back of the volume, where nearly a third are women (10 of 31).
Which publications brought these stories to light in the first place (and where you might find next year’s winner’s now)? Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine published four of the stories, Mystery Tribune (two), and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Fiction River, and Switchblade, one apiece. Also Level Best Books’ anthologies (Noir at the Salad Bar and Snowbound) produced a pair of them. ( )