The Best American Mystery Stories 2008 by George Pelecanos, Otto Penzler (Editor)

From the Publisher

“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.)

Kirkus Reviews

The 12th annual edition of this anthology, whose general editor is Otto Penzler, collects 20 blue-ribbon entries, all dressed up in impeccable noir. In his introduction, Pelecanos calls the stories that make up the collection "wonderful," and it's true that the quality of the prose is unfailingly high. That's no surprise, for the names are stellar: James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, S.J. Rozan and, from outside the genre, Alice Munro and Joyce Carol Oates. These people can write. Unless you're a hardcore fan, 400 pages of unremitting, unrelenting noir can be daunting, particularly to worldviews on the fragile side. But you'll go a long way to find a story more moving and, yes, more unsettling than Hugh Sheehy's "The Invisibles," about what it means, and how it hurts, to be socially invisible. As the invisible 17-year-old heroine suggests, it's one of the ways serial killers are made. "Proof of God," Holly Goddard Jones's story about love gone disastrously wrong, manages to be at once ugly, brutal and deeply affecting. In Elizabeth Strout's poignant, painful "A Different Road," the aftermath of a hostage situation proves as destructive as the experience itself. And so it goes-a journey that will leave some readers delighted, others depressed, and most a little bit of both. An eminently worthwhile collection, though perhaps not for those prone to Weltschmerz.

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