Tag Archives: Mysterious Press

The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2025, by John Grisham and Otto Penzler*****

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John Grisham and Otto Penzler have teamed up and compiled a delightful, high-quality collection of short mystery stories to entertain you. My thanks go to NetGalley, High Bridge Audio, and Penzler Publishers for the review copies. You can buy this book now.

All told, there are 20 stories that made the cut, plus a “bonus” story at the end. This mystifies me; why not just say there are 21 stories? Maybe there’s a tradition of only selecting 20. At any rate, I liked all of them except one, which I’ll explain in a moment. They are all well written, and they encompass a wide variety of subgenres. My favorites are “Home Game,” by Craig Faustus Buck; “Only a Story,” by Kai Lovelace; and “Effie’s Oasis,” by Casey Stegman. I had never even heard of any of these writers, so now I have three new authors to watch for. I was not as fond of “Dream Stuff,” by Lou Manfredo, but that’s because I dislike noir mysteries for the way that women are disrespected. Here’s an example: “Mary Lou, my previously noted overpaid secretary, poked her cute little head into my office…” and it goes on in that vein. I haven’t deducted anything from my rating, because I know that the aspects that I find problematic are part and parcel of noir mysteries, and so I can’t see penalizing this one author in the collection, or Grisham and Penzler, when I know that there are a considerable number of readers that love these stories, and not all of them are men.

One other minor irritation is that I was provided with both the digital and audio versions of the galley, but the stories aren’t in the same order in both books, which led to a fair amount of panicked flipping around my digital copy to try to match up with the story being read. If they’re going to edit the order in one format, I’d appreciate it if they would do it in both so that they match; hopefully this is straightened out in the finished copies.

 But while I’m talking about the audio version, I should also mention that the readers, Marnye Young and Jamie Renell, are top notch. There’s a great deal of dialogue in most of these stories, and they are both pitch perfect in reading the characters’ voices.

Whether you prefer a print or digital copy to read with your eyes, or an audio book that can follow you around while you do other things, you can’t go wrong with this collection. Highly recommended to all that enjoy the genre, and perfect for Halloween.

Eddie’s Boy, by Thomas Perry*****

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Can we talk for a minute? It’s just…well, don’t you hate it when you have to kill four assassins that were gunning for you, but then they won’t all fit in your trunk? It’s the worst; but when Thomas Perry writes about it, it’s the very best. My thanks go to Edelweiss and Mysterious Press for the review copy of Eddie’s Boy. This book is available to the public today.

This mystery is the fourth installment of Perry’s hugely successful Butcher’s Boy series. For those that aren’t in the loop, Michael Shaeffer (as he currently calls himself) was orphaned as a small child and taken in by the neighborhood butcher, who raised him as his only son. But the butcher didn’t merely cut and sell meat for the dinner trade; he had a side line that involved cutting, and otherwise killing, people that other people wanted dead. Both trades were passed on to his adopted son Michael. Now, however, the butcher has been gone a long time; Michael is an older man, retired from all of everything, and happily married to a minor member of the British nobility, living in a splendid home in the UK. They grow lovely rosebushes together.

But then in the wee hours one day, Michael is awakened by a tiny but unmistakable sound that tells him someone is entering his home. Sadly, it is not a mere burglar, but hired muscle sent by a vengeful someone that has figured out who he is and where he lives. Now Michael and his wife cannot rest until he finds out who is pursuing him and disposes of them.

This book is the caliber of the early work that made Perry famous. The suspense and pacing starts out at ten and it stays there till the thing is over. There’s a particularly heart-stopping scene on a train early on that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. And the details make it even more chilling. Returning to the four corpses that can’t all fit in the trunk; after Schaeffer moves one dead killer to the passenger seat and belts him in, he tosses a tarp over the three men in the trunk, and then he drops his flight bag on top of them, because he means to jettison the men en route to the airport.

Can you read this thriller even if you haven’t read the first three in the series? Sure you can. In fact, the third in the series was still on my wish list when the chance to read and review this one appeared, and obviously I navigated it just fine. But I want the one that I missed extra hard now, and I guarantee that once you have read this one, you’ll want to read the rest also.

Highly recommended to those that love a good thriller.

The Burglar, by Thomas Perry****

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Thomas Perry’s tightly plotted suspense novels always keep me on the edge of my chair. Big thanks go to Net Galley and Mysterious Press for the review copy. This book will be available to the public January 8, 2019. 

Our protagonist is Elle, a twenty-four-year-old Californian that is also a professional burglar. She was raised by relatives that ditched her when she was barely grown, and so she makes her living taking jewelry from rich people’s houses. They in turn will file the loss with their insurance companies, so no harm, no foul. She is on one such expedition when she comes across three murdered people that were apparently killed while they were having a three-way on the homeowner’s bed. Worse: there’s at least one camera involved. It might provide the identity of the killer, but then it might provide her identity as well. What’s a girl to do? 

In the real world, the answer would be simple: you were never there. Destroy the camera, go through the wallets for any cash, then get gone fast. Elle has no police record, so even if she wasn’t gloved up, her prints wouldn’t matter, nor would her DNA. Just go. 

But that wouldn’t make for an interesting story, now would it? 

Elle decides to make sure that the cops get the camera, but without her identity on it. This adds a twist, requiring her to break in again in order to return the camera once she’s looked at it and done the other things she needs to do, but in the midst of all this she is being stalked by a mysterious black SUV. In time it becomes clear that someone associated with the house, and likely associated with the murders, wants to kill her. In order to stay alive without going to jail, she must learn the killer’s identity and get the proof to the cops, again without being implicated herself. 

There are a number of places here where I stop, roll my eyes and say, No way. For one thing, Elle owns her own house. How does an orphaned 24-year-old afford a Los Angeles home? I could easily see her squatting in a house that’s for sale, or even inheriting a house from a dead relative after her other family members scarper out of the area, but to have purchased real estate by age 24? No no no no. How does a young woman like that even have a credit history? It defies common sense. In addition, Elle has a vast amount of knowledge in many different areas despite her lack of formal education. How does a 24-year-old know about the history of architecture in Southern California, just for one example? 

But here’s the interesting thing. Despite all of these inconsistencies, I wanted to keep reading. I usually have somewhere between four and ten books going at a time, in various locations and on various devices, and this was not the only good book I was reading at the time; yet when it was time to kick back and read, this one is the one I most wanted to read. And this has never happened to me before. Usually a book with so many holes in the plot and in the construction of the protagonist either causes me to abandon the title or more frequently, plod through it simmering with resentment because I have committed myself to writing a fair review. But not here. With Perry’s book, while part of my brain is tallying the impossible aspects of the novel, the other part of my brain asks, “So what happens next?”

The simple truth is that despite everything, Thomas Perry is a master of suspense. This is what keeps me coming back to him, every stinking time. There’s nobody that writes taut, fast-paced novels of suspense the way this guy does, and so come what may, I had to finish this novel, not out of obligation but for myself, and for the same reason, I will come back to read him again, again, and again.

The Bomb Maker, by Thomas Perry****

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TheBombMakerThomas Perry writes some of the most terrifyingly suspenseful novels of any writer alive, and he never has a dud. In this story, a retired bomb squad cop is asked to come back to work when half the current squad has been wiped out by someone that wants to kill bomb specialists. I was able to read it free and early thanks to Edelweiss and Mysterious Press. It will be available to the public January 2, 2018, just in time to start the new year with a bang.

Dick Stahl has just returned from carrying out a tricky job in Mexico. Retired from the bomb squad and police work, he owns a consulting firm and is ready for a rest. But someone out there—most likely not a terrorist, since nobody claims credit for the carnage—has taken out half of the bomb squad, and clearly the technicians themselves were targeted.  More attempts are made; there are numerous explosive devices planted in a given location. The guy that plants these things wants them to be found, and so there’s an obvious, textbook-type incendiary left in plain view. The bomber’s intention is for the technicians to relax, believing they have destroyed the threat, and it is then that the real bomb—or chain of bombs—is triggered in order to take out as many bomb techs in one blow as is possible. Stahl has his work cut out for him when he is called back to duty to foil this killer and aid his capture.

In addition to Stahl, we see the bomb maker’s thinking and what he is planning. Perry’s villain is a cold, calculating schemer, and there’s a chilling sense of remove in this part of the narrative. The pacing is tight, with minimal word-smithery to get in the way. Perry doesn’t paint anything; he just tells us what’s about to happen…maybe.

Side character Diane Hines, a member of the squad that becomes romantically involved with Stahl, is an interesting addition, a smart, savvy professional. Whereas I am sorry to see the only important female character used primarily as a sexual entanglement that complicates Stahl’s career, I give Perry retrospective credit for his Jane Whitefield series, which is legendary and features a strong female lead.

That said, the journey here is a lot more interesting than the destination. On the one hand, Perry doesn’t cheat the reader by throwing something out to left field and making the conclusion impossible to predict. Perry’s treatment here is respectful of his readership. On the other hand, I am sorry to have such a fascinating story unspool to such an anticlimactic ending.

It’s worth noting that although this writer has produced a lot of books, he never uses any obvious formula. No matter how many I read, I don’t walk away feeling as if I have read the same book packaged differently.

Recommended for Perry’s fans, but get it cheap or free unless your pockets are deep ones.