The Best American Mystery Stories 2008 »

A devotee of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, George P. Pelecanos has honed his street-smart style with a series of detective thrillers all set in the seamier corners of the D.C./Maryland/Virginia triangle.

A must-read for anyone who cares about crime stories. Booklist

The award-winning author and Emmy-nominated television writer George Pelecanos serves as editor of the twelfth installment of this genre-expanding anthology, featuring twenty of the past year s most enthralling, suspenseful, and slyly illuminating mystery stories.

A cut-and-dried case for a wily crime-scene reconstructionist is turned on its head in Michael Connelly s Mulholland Dive. A terrible secret shared between two childhood friends resurfaces decades later as one of them lies on her deathbed in Alice Munro s masterful Child s Play. James Lee Burke tells the haunting tale of a Hurricane Katrina evacuee who unexpectedly finds comfort from an unimaginable loss in Mist. And in Holly Goddard Jones s Proof of God, a young man s car is repeatedly vandalized as proof that someone knows about the truths he d never willingly reveal. As Pelecanos notes in his introduction, the twenty original and unique voices in this collection pay homage to the genre s forebears by taking crime fiction into a thrilling new direction. But make no mistake, he says, we are all standing on the shoulders of writers who came before us and left an indelible mark on literature through craftsmanship, care, and the desire to leave something of worth behind.

Publishers Weekly

The top-notch 12th entry in this "best of" series offers superb writing from authors both well and little known. The nature of the 20 selections again lends support to those who think the series should be more accurately titled The Best American Crime Stories. As Pelecanos notes in the introduction, "none of these stories are puzzles, locked-room mysteries, or private detective tales." Some of the best have only an incidental connection to crime, as in the chance encounter with a robber in a hospital that triggers the decline of an elderly couple in a small New England town in Elizabeth Strout's "A Different Road." Likewise, Joyce Carol Oates's "The Blind Man's Sighted Daughters" focuses on the sacrifices made by an adult daughter caring for her aged father. Alice Munro's chilling "Child's Play" is another standout, with its casual but depressing depiction of the brutality children are capable of. Few will dispute Pelecanos's contention that several stories in the anthology would qualify for The Best American Short Stories from the same publisher. (Oct.)

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