A thrilling anthology of contemporary short crime fiction featuring work by Laura Lippman, Gabino Iglesias and others."Crime writers, forgive the pun, are killing it right now creatively," writes guest editor Alafair Burke in her introduction. "It was difficult—painful even—to narrow this year's Best American Mystery and Suspense to only twenty stories."Spanning from a mediocre spa in Florida, to New York's gritty East Village, to death row in Alabama, this...

“While a single sentence can turn a novel, a single word can turn a short story,” writes guest editor Don Winslow. The pieces featured in this collection hinge on those small, exacting moments that shock, spook, delight, and change a story entirely. A disgraced ex-cop approaches a crossroads with his ex-wife and new neighbor, pistol in hand; an ill-advised acid trip reveals the dark side of a twisted friendship; a hardened hit man struggles with his latest target. Full of dramatic...

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE“[A] suspense-filled page-turner.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer"A touching portrait of two families bound together by a split-second decision.” —Attica Locke, Edgar-Award winning author of Bluebird, BluebirdA Best Book of theYearWall Street Journal *

A stunning, edgy debut introducing Juniper Song, an amateur sleuth taking on the darkness in the veins of L.A. with razor-sharp wit and a breaking heart.Juniper Song knows secrets–how to keep them and how to search them out. As a girl, noir fiction was her favorite escape, and Philip Marlowe has always been her literary idol. So when her friend Luke asks her to investigate a possible affair between his father and a young employee, Juniper (or "Song" as her friends call her) finds a...

A collection of the year’s best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by New York Times bestselling author Lisa Unger and series editor Steph Cha.“This form has a special kind of magic, the ability to transport you quickly, intensely, to capture character, time, place, and story with immediacy,” writes guest editor Lisa Unger in her introduction. The transporting stories in this year’s The Best American Mystery and Suspense are populated by ...

A collection of the year’s best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby, author of Razorblade Tears, and series editor Steph Cha.In his introduction, guest editor S. A. Cosby observes that writing short stories is "a special skill that combines brevity with wit and cleverness and the hint of the existential malaise that imbues powerful crime fiction with its gravitas." The stories in this collec...

A collection of the year’s best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by #1 New York Times bestselling author and guest editor Jess Walter and series editor Steph Cha.New York Times bestselling author and “superb storyteller” (Boston Globe), Jess Walter flexes his genre chops and selects twenty short stories that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

“Crime fiction has always been outsider fiction, and this anthology, too, is a safe harbor for misfits and outcasts,” writes guest editor Megan Abbott. Full of wacky, peculiar, and eccentric characters, The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2026 features an enterprising dental hygienist who makes some extra money by collecting corpses for a funeral home, a sixth-grade girl who uses her competitive jump-roping skills to protect herself from looming danger, and a broke young car th...

Private eye Jim Sader returns in a hard-hitting hunt for a missing child through the dark corners of sunny southern California"You're playing with a child's life": The search for a kidnapped boy leads private detective (and ex-alcoholic) Jim Sader through a labyrinth of well-hidden family secrets and into the heart of an elaborate and malevolent deception. With little to go on--a tight-lipped client, an anonymous letter, a mother who is supposed to be dead--Sader m...

Rediscover one of America’s pioneering women crime writers with this classic noir starring a Long Beach private investigator reminiscent of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe“Are you trying to tell me you don't want the job, Mr. Sader?”It started as a missing persons case and grew more puzzling with the discovery of another strangely coincidental disappearance. Private eye Jim Sader finds himself deep in a multilayered intrigue revolving around oil and real ...

In The Girl from Hollywood, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the legendary creator of Tarzan, turns his eye to the seamy underbelly of Prohibition-era Hollywood.In this gritty tale of the Jazz Age, the Penningtons, a close-knit ranching family from the Santa Monica Mountains, and Shannon, a vulnerable young starlet making her way in Hollywood, find themselves ensnared in an underworld of contraband liquor and illicit drugs. Ashamed of her scandalous past, Shannon finds solace while visiting th...

Juniper Song—an unforgettable new crime heroine hailed as "young, sharp, and worldly-wise" by New York Times bestselling author Meg Gardiner—returns in this smart, fast-paced follow-up to Steph Cha's critically acclaimed debut Follow Her HomeWorking as an apprentice at a P.I. firm, Juniper Song finds herself nose deep in a Hollywood murder scandal where the lies may be more glamorous than most, but the truths they cover are just as ugly. When a young woman named Daphne Freamon calls...