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AHMM regular B. K. Stevens drops an insightful post on SleuthSayers for mystery writers as well as readers.

Criminals and writers often employ misdirection, as a number of this month’s stories demonstrate. In S. L. Franklin’s “A Precautionary Tale,” private eye R. J. Carr’s client is a victim of such misdirection when his snow shovel is stolen and used in a murder. In Eric Rutter’s spy story “Proof” two veteran spies reconnect following careers spent in lies and misdirection. In Diana Deverell’s “Opening Day, 1954,” a rookie policewoman must evaluate the credibility of a bomb threat received at a busy theme park. And in Stephen P. Kelner, Jr.’s “Death at the Althing,” Thorbjörn is tasked with redirecting the grievances of two bickering elders at the ancient Icelandic proto-parliament known as the Althing.

Meanwhile, David Edgerley Gates’s fixer Mickey Counihan shows that an indirect approach is sometimes more effective in “Stone Soup.” An unhappy wife engages in the most familiar of marital misdirection in “Pisan Zapra” by Josh Pachter. And Randy Davison finds his life in need of any direction in Eve Fisher’s Laskin, South Dakota–set “Iron Chef.”

And now you need no further direction, reader, but to turn the page.

As social creatures, we live enmeshed in a network of responsibilities to others, be they family members, friends, or colleagues. These are bonds that crime, as many of this month’s stories attest, can severely strain. The duties of friendship press against moral boundaries for two life-long buddies in Brian Cox’s “The Frozen Fiske.” An assignment to escort a WWII hero around Detroit presents an ethical dilemma for the tough-talking vice cops The Four Horsemen in Loren D. Estleman’s “Playing the Ace.” Another kind of ethical quandary faces a psychiatrist evaluating a murder suspect in Wendy Leeds’ “First, Dig Two Graves.” A young spy poses as a bookkeeper in a postwar Austrian TB sanitarium in Eve Fisher’s “Miss West’s First Case.” And two cops probe a deadly mugging in a gentrifying Glasgow in Russel D. McLean’s atmospheric “Tout.”

We also feature two bookish mysteries this month. A Louisa May Alcott aficionado is pulled into a deadly race to locate one of the author’s manuscripts in Marianne Wilski Strong’s “Louisa and the Silver Buckle.” And our Mystery Classic reacquaints readers with the gaslight era master thief Godahl, created by Frederick Irving Anderson and introduced here by Joseph Goodrich.

As you can see, we take seriously our responsibility to deliver an issue of great reads.

The classic loner private eye notwithstanding, crime and its investigation occur within a social context. This month’s issue includes stories featuring team detective work in Janice Law’s “A Taste of Murder” and Sarah Weinman’s “Death of a Feminist.” Ties of friendship (allegedly) motivate characters in Brendan DuBois’s “A Battlefield Reunion” and Michael Bracken’s “Chase Your Dreams.” Familial obligations and gang ties are at odds in Martin Limón’s “The King of K-Pop.” “Poor Sherm” endures the pressures of family expectations in our Mystery Classic by Ruth Chessman (whose own daughter, Jane K. Cleland, introduces the tale). Finally, love, the greatest of all social engines, drives characters to behave badly in Erica Wright’s first story for AHMM, “Patsy Cline at Harry’s Last Chance Saloon.”

It’s a threatening world outside our editorial offices, but here at