The best american myster.., p.1
The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Foreword
Introduction
Scarlet Ribbons by Megan Abbott
Matter of Trust by Frankie Y. Bailey
For I Hungered, and Ye Gave Me by Barrett Bowlin
Just a Girl by Alyssa Cole
Rumpus Room by Tananarive Due
The Body Farm by Abby Geni
Lovely and Useless Things by Nils Gilbertson
Possessory Credit by Diana Gould
My Savage Year by Jordan Harper
The Mysterious Disappearance of Jason Whetstone by Karen Harrington
With the Right Bait by Gar Anthony Haywood
Baby Trap by Toni LP Kelner
Scorpions by Nick Kolakowski
The Funeral Suit by Bobby Mathews
Will I See the Birds When I Am Gone by Stanton McCaffery
Monster by Shannon Taft
The Book of Ruth by Mary Thorson
Sarah Lane’s School for Girls by Rebecca Turkewitz
Unknown Caller by Lisa Unger
Holler, Child by LaToya Watkins
Contributors’ Notes
Other Distinguished Mystery and Suspense of 2023
About the Editors
Guest Editors of The Best American Mystery and Suspense
About Mariner Books
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
A few days before Christmas, my father was home alone when he heard what sounded like pebbles hitting his bedroom window. He looked outside and saw two masked men in head-to-toe black, standing expectantly in his backyard. They’d hopped my parents’ gate and were checking to see if the house was empty; they had, I assume, burglarious intentions.
We hosted a Christmas Eve party right after this happened, and I overheard my dad telling this story no fewer than three times. According to at least one version, my sixty-seven-year-old father grabbed his gun and chased the men into the street. He also concedes that they started running as soon as he came to the window.
This was one of the more dramatic happenings in my family’s life in 2023. It was, anyway, our year’s closest brush with crime. It was also a true nonevent in the scheme of things: a trespass, an aborted burglary, a retiree with an unloaded gun. At most, a NextDoor post. For us, though, it held a certain small significance. Everything feels meaningful when it’s close to home.
This is, of course, the power of a good story. It removes distance, letting us experience other people’s problems with an immediacy that is otherwise hard to access. Over the last four years, I’ve read thousands of crime stories for The Best American Mystery and Suspense. I’m familiar with the genre conventions and, at this point, I’m almost never surprised by the novelty of a plot line. On the other hand, I remain constantly moved and delighted by particulars.
It is an honor to edit this series, to find stories I love and share them with such an appreciative audience. Since its inception as The Best American Mystery Stories in 1997, this anthology has published short fiction by many of your favorite writers at different points in their careers. It also boasts an illustrious roster of guest editors: Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton, Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, Nelson DeMille, Joyce Carol Oates, Scott Turow, Carl Hiaasen, George Pelecanos, Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child, Harlan Coben, Robert Crais, Lisa Scottoline, Laura Lippman, James Patterson, Elizabeth George, John Sandford, Louise Penny, Jonathan Lethem, C. J. Box, Alafair Burke, Jess Walter, and Lisa Unger.
For Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, I had the pleasure of working with Southern noir juggernaut S. A. Cosby. I’m not even sure when Shawn and I met, but we’ve known each other for years, and I’m a huge fan of his work. He’s written four fantastic novels: My Darkest Prayer, Blacktop Wasteland, Razorblade Tears, and All the Sinners Bleed. The first of these came out in 2018, but he’s already had an enormous impact on the mystery and suspense world, with award-winning, bestselling books that have helped reshape the genre. He’s won the Macavity, the Anthony, the Barry, the Hammett, the International Thriller Writers award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, some of these in back-to-back years. He’s also a multiple Edgar nominee. For many readers, including one Barack Obama, he’s probably the defining writer of contemporary crime fiction.
What many people might not know is that Shawn cut his teeth on short stories, cranking out hundreds of them in the years leading up to his first novel. He published many of these with Thuglit, which also counts many BAMS authors among its contributors. Shawn may write instant bestsellers now, but he spent years honing his craft and voice in the comparatively niche world of short crime fiction. This may account, in part, for his deep camaraderie and continuous generosity with other writers.
He still writes tons of short stories, by the way—I’m always excited to come across them in my reading for this anthology. He was a contributor to The Best American Mystery and Suspense in both 2022 and 2023. He would’ve been eligible for this year’s, too, but he took a year off to be my guest editor. Shawn has been an extremely game partner in this process, and I am very grateful to him for his intelligence, enthusiasm, and willingness to work on the unreasonable schedule I foisted on him.
I’ve had a wild year—I judged the National Book Awards and have been shooting a TV show in South Korea, where I am currently in a hotel room writing this overdue foreword after an all-nighter on set. As I’ve mentioned in past volumes, I also have two small children. My first was born less than two weeks after editor Nicole Angeloro tapped me for Best American. Because of all the above, I’ve gone five years without working on a novel. Editing this series has kept me connected to my people and my love of crime fiction. I will never get sick of reading fresh stories and working with writers like Shawn.
This is my fourth anthology, so I knew where to find eligible stories, and, helpfully, writers and editors knew where to find me. I read through every issue of Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, as well as Akashic’s collections of noir and genre stories. I tracked down crime anthologies, many of them after receiving submissions from individual authors or editors, and kept tabs on the various mystery publications, both in print and online. I also hit up editors of literary journals for crime or crime-adjacent stories. I sifted through all these stories and picked around fifty of the best (or, more accurately, my favorites), which I passed on to Shawn. He read them as fast as I could get them to him, and he chose his favorites. We had an 11:30 p.m. Zoom meeting on maybe the last possible night before selections were due and finalized the list, sharing our thoughts and gushing about these spectacular stories. Twenty of them made it into this volume, but you can find the remaining thirty candidates in the honorable mentions at the back of this book. All the writers and stories on that list are worth seeking out.
As you read this volume, I hope to be well into my reading for The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025. I still worry about missing eligible stories, so authors and editors, please do send me your work. Five of the twenty this year were direct submissions by authors, and three were from sources I might otherwise not have found. To qualify, stories must be originally written in English (or translated by the original authors) by writers born or permanently residing in America or Canada. They need to be independent stories (not excerpts) published in the calendar year 2023 in American (or Canadian) publications, either print or online. I have a strong preference for web submissions, which you can send in any reasonable format to bestamericanmysterysuspense@gmail.com. If you would like to send printed materials, you can email me for a mailing address. The submissions deadline is December 31, and when possible, several months earlier. I promise to look at every story sent to me before that deadline. After that, well, let’s say it depends on my schedule.
I’m proud of all our work here, and grateful for the chance to share these outstanding stories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
Steph Cha
Introduction
The summer after I graduated from high school I went to the library to get some books for the weekend. Yes, I was the kind of kid who got books for the weekend instead of being invited to parties. Anyway, as I was perusing the shelves I came across a book of short stories called The Best American Mystery Stories, edited by Sue Grafton.
At this time in my life, I knew I wanted to be a writer but I wasn’t sure what genre was best for me. I loved horror novels and sci-fi and fantasy. However, my heart always seemed to come back to mysteries, to crime fiction. Before that day I’d never heard of the BAMS. But in that anthology, under Sue Grafton’s sure hand, I found short stories that moved me, that made me laugh, that made me think. I think it was the first time I really understood the power of the short crime story. The magic that happens for a brief moment, like a shooting star streaking across the sky, when you read a story that grabs you by the hand and says, “Come with me, see what I have to show you.”
It’s not always pretty what we are shown but then again, we can’t appreciate the light without the darkness. We can’t enjoy the sweetness without a taste of the bitter. These days the market for short stories is eroding like a thin strip of beach in a hurricane and I think that’s a shame. Some of the greatest crime and mystery writers of all time were masters of the form. It’s a special skill that combines brevity with wit and cleverness and the hint of the existential malaise that im
The twenty stories in this collection are some of the finest examples of short crime fiction I’ve read in a long, long time. There are stories here about loss, about love, about revenge and justice. There are stories that will make you laugh; some will make you cry and some will leave you stunned by the incredible width and breadth of their ambition and the beauty of their achievements.
It was my honor to work with Steph Cha to bring these stories to you. Many of the authors here are included in this anthology for the first time. I can tell you from personal experience that being included in the main collection or being cited as a Distinguished Story can be one of your first and most important accolades as a crime writer. It’s your entry into a special club, where you can find yourself alongside your idols. And that more than anything is the enduring legacy of The Best American Mystery and Suspense anthology. It brings you, the reader, new writers you may not have been aware of, and it allows you to read the work of writers you are intimately familiar with.
It’s a place where everyone is welcomed as long as you can tell a compelling tale. It’s another link in the long chain that connects all storytellers from African griots to Sophocles to your favorite authors today.
Well, enough from me, you didn’t pick this book up to hear me ramble on. You came for the stories. So, sit down, get comfortable.
Here, let me show you something. Let me show you what’s here waiting for us, here in the dark.
S. A. Cosby
Scarlet Ribbons
Megan Abbott
from A Darker Shade of Noir
All the children knew about the Hoffman House.
Penny couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t know about it. She had spent all of her eleven years three doors down and around the corner from it, and it had been empty her entire life.
No one had lived in the house for years, though everyone seemed to remember a time when new renters had passed through, staying a week or two and then disappearing in the night, even leaving their belongings behind, suitcases left open, boxes unpacked.
It was the neighborhood spookhouse, the Halloween dare, the stuff of all the children’s nightmares, and Doctor Hoffman was the boogeyman that haunted their dreams, sharpened their taunts, fired their morbid kid fantasies.
Sometimes, high school boys threw rocks at the windows. Then, last spring, two girls in Penny’s class came to school, breathless. They claimed they had snuck up to the house. The doors were all boarded shut, but they had seen things in the windows: TV trays, a dusty globe, rippled magazines, a stuffed teddy bear, its stomach chewed open. A Formica table covered with fading Christmas wrapping paper and all the trimmings, long ribbons curled into wilting bows.
By the end of the school day, they were claiming they’d seen the hammer itself, red-slathered and punched hard into the entryway floor.
That didn’t seem like it could be true. The police would have taken the weapon, Susan Candliss insisted. Don’t you know anything?
Besides, another girl said, how could it be stuck in the floor? It was a ball peen, not a claw.
And then someone insisted the Hoffmans were Jewish anyway and wouldn’t have Christmas paper.
But that visit had an impact. Soon, other girls wanted to go. It was like French kissing. Soon enough, if you hadn’t done it, you were good as dead.
Though it had happened many years ago, it seemed like almost everyone knew someone who was a part of it. Maybe their aunt or aunt’s friend had been one of Doctor Hoffman’s patients and remembered he always had such soft, dimpled hands when he placed the stethoscope over her heart. Maybe their father used to mow the Hoffmans’ lawn when he was in high school and sometimes could see Mrs. Hoffman clipping her prized night-blooming jasmine, her monkey-faced orchids, her spider lilies in the glass conservatory. Maybe they’d even heard the hushed recounting from the neighbor who took in the Hoffman girl the night it happened, when she ran down the zigzag front steps and pounded on their glass door, her hair thick with blood.
The story was deceptively simple. Doctor Hoffman had been a heart doctor and his wife Agnes led the Horticulture Society and decorated their marvelous home. They had three children, sixteen-year-old Bettye and the eleven-year-old twins, Jody and Kathy.
These were the known things, the rest were heard things, passed things, behind hands at slumber parties, whispered in the kitchen at cocktail parties.
Things like this: Doctor Hoffman would sometimes have agonizing headaches that would make him nearly go blind with pain and you could hear his screams from the hill below the house.
And like this: once, in her high school English class, Bettye recited a poem she’d written herself about a merry-go-round that never stopped spinning and all the children clutched on the horses eventually grew up and grew old while the ride kept going. Their now-gray hair had grown so long it caught in the horses’ pumping legs and wound around their hooves, setting sparks that caught fire and the merry-go-round went up in flames. A fire, a fire, and they finally knew what it was that they had been running from! she read to the rapt class, her voice shaking with feeling.
But no one could have guessed what was to come next. A December night when something snapped inside Doctor Hoffman. That was what everyone said—“Something snapped” or “He snapped,” as though this could happen to anyone, as though any parent, any father, might one day take a ball-peen hammer and crush his wife’s skull as she slept. Which was what Doctor Hoffman did.
Bludgeoned. That was the word people often used. It was a terrible word, Penny thought. It felt like a cold marble in your mouth, the kind that might land in the center of your throat so you couldn’t breathe at all.
But Doctor Hoffman wasn’t done. Bettye woke up to her mother’s screams and to her father standing above her bed, the hammer raised above his head. He caught one glancing blow on her temple before she spun loose and stumbled to the floor, crawling across the thick pink carpet of her princess bedroom, then leaping to her feet, running down the zigzag steps, her father behind, chasing after her, tripping on his pajamas—patterned with painted clowns holding balloons—and stumbling, giving Bettye just enough time to escape through the front door and down the steep concrete to a neighbor’s house, screaming, screaming, screaming.
The twins were climbing out their window when their father walked by their open bedroom door. He stared at them a long minute, hammer swinging at his side.
Go back to sleep, he told them calmly. This is a nightmare.
Go back to sleep. This is a nightmare.
Meanwhile, the neighbor opened his door to find Bettye there in her nightgown, blood pouring down her cheek and neck like a bucket of paint had tipped over on her head.
He called for his wife as Bettye kept asking, over and over, Where are the twins? Where’s Mommy?, scratching her head with fingers red-slicked. Poking at the wound on her head until the neighbor’s wife fainted right on the doorstep.
The neighbor ran to the Hoffman house and opened the front door, and he could hear this awful, ghoulish moaning. Slowly, slowly creeping upstairs, he could see Doctor Hoffman roaming the hall in his gaudy clown pajamas, the hammer loose between his fingers.
He was saying strange things, the neighbor said, and only later was it reported in all the newspapers that he’d been reciting from Dante’s Inferno, Canto One open on his bedside table. Midway through the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward path had been lost . . .
By then, Doctor Hoffman had already taken a fatal combination of barbiturates.
Moments later, while tending to the children, the neighbor heard a slump and discovered Doctor Hoffman on his bedroom carpet, a swirl of his clown pajamas.
Maybe it wasn’t true, at least most of it, but it felt true.
No one knew what happened to the children after. They would be grown-ups by now, maybe with children of their own. Who could guess the nightmares they had? Who could guess how they slept again?
It was rumored that Doctor Hoffman had financial difficulties. That that was what had driven him to such dark acts. He couldn’t afford the grand home in which they lived, complete with ballroom and glassed-in conservatory. But others said it was “emotional.” That Doctor Hoffman had struggled with melancholy before and maybe had even been in a sanitorium.
