Here, you will find highlights of each month's print issue – including excerpts from our award-winning short stories, our book-review column The Jury Box, and The Mystery Crossword.The place to be for a good mystery!
Subscribe today.

Our final issue of 2014 deals with families and relationships, and of course crime, mayhem, and suspense. The tension first peaks in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Equatorial,” about a husband and wife who travel to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, the wife feeling more endangered every moment as she pieces together bits of the past and perceives the perils of the rugged terrain. 

The conflicts of home are brought across international borders in Christine Poulson’s white-knuckle adventure “Roller-Coaster Ride” as well, set in Denmark, where an English mother with two-small kids suspects she’s being followed by her ex-husband.  And in Hilary Davidson’s “My Sweet Angel of Death,” a grieving mother tries to find solace on a South American ranch, only to find that a serial abductor and killer may be on the lose. 

Parental relationships also feature in Allan J. Emerson’s Department of First Stories debut “Judgment Day,” set in the aftermath of a grim crime; in a new case for Bill Pronzini’s Nameless P.I., in which an elderly jazz singer tries desperately to find the daughter he was forced to abandon as a child (“Who You Been Grapplin’ With?”); and in “The Tavern Keeper’s Daughter” by Miriam Grace Monfredo, a historical circling around the death (or murder?) of a cruel father in nineteenth-century Western New York. 

Romantic relationships of various sorts provide the pivot for the remaining stories in the issue. Kevin Wignall has us on the edge of our seats with the story of a retired underworld figure who, with a new romance and a new home, tries to move on—but is he savvy enough to outrun his past, and what will he risk (“The Messenger”)? By contrast, in this month’s dark Black Mask entry by Michael Wiley, “Concrete Town,” we see how far a romantic attachment can go wrong, as the protagonist schemes what to do after betraying her partner.  Betrayal of a different sort sets the action in motion in a somewhat lighthearted but twisty Passport to Crime story by René Appel, in which the narrator is caught “Red-Handed”—but the story doesn’t end there! 

This emotionally charged, page-turning issue also contains this year’s index and Readers Award ballot (with an early return date of 12/1/14). Be a part of the magazine you enjoy—vote and let us know what kinds of stories you want to see in our pages!

Equatorial
by Joyce Carol Oates
Art by Mark Evan Walker

He’d tried to kill her. She was certain.

It was not a thought that came lightly, or casually—My husband wants to kill me. I must protect myself. 

“Audrey! Be careful.”. . .

Read more

Who You Been Grapplin' With?
by Bill Pronzini
Art by Mark Evans

IHe was sitting on one of the anteroom chairs when I came into the agency that morning. A rather shabbily dressed black man well up in his seventies, thin and on the frail side, with a mostly hairless, liver-spotted scalp, rheumy eyes, a long, ridged upper lip, and the kind of slumped posture and pain-etched features that indicate failing health. At first glance you might have taken him for one of San Francisco’s legion of homeless street people, but only at first glance. . . .

Read more

DON'T MISS our January 2015 issue featuring stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Bill James, Dennis McFadden, Lou Manfredo and more!