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April 7, 2020 · 3:38 pm

“Kickass Women of the Bible” by Kenneth Wishnia

Kenneth Wishnia is the author of 23 Shades of Black, The Fifth Servant, and Red House, and is the editor of Jewish Noir. His short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Queens Noir, Long Island Noir, Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail, and elsewhere. Here he discusses the inspiration behind his story “Bride of Torches” in the current issue of AHMM.

The biblical Book of Judges depicts a semilawless era before ancient Israel was united under a strong monarchy, an unstable period defined by vivid flashes of extreme violence, when rugged tribal chieftains were the principal source of strength and authority (think of Samson and his downfall).

The cycle of violence includes mass mutilations, an apparent human sacrifice, and an idolatrous warrior named Abimelech who commits mass fratricide, killing seventy of his brothers in a single day, in order to become king, then commits a horrific war crime—burning alive one thousand men and women who had sought refuge in a tunnel. But they are avenged when Abimelech besieges the town of Thebez and an unnamed woman drops a millstone from the ramparts onto his head and cracks open his skull. He orders his attendant to kill him with a dagger so that no one will say that a woman killed him. (Judges 9:53-55).

Gustave Doré: The Death of Abimelech

When I first set out to read the Bible in its entirety more than thirty years ago, I went with a traditional Hebrew Bible in English translation. No explanatory notes. Just the Hebrew text on the right-hand pages with a clunky King James Version-style translation on the facing pages.

The King James Bible (KJV) is a towering achievement, and countless terms and phrases in its majestic language have entered our language. But sometimes its poetic qualities can present an obstacle to understanding the plain meaning of the text. One of my favorite examples comes when Sarah tells Abraham to cast her handmaid Hagar, and Abraham’s firstborn son Ishmael, into the wilderness. Abraham is torn, and asks God for advice. In the KJV, God replies:

Let it not be grievous in thy sight because of the lad, and because of thy bondwoman; in all that Sarah hath said unto thee, hearken unto her voice; for in Isaac shall thy seed be called. (Gen. 21:12)

Hearken unto her voice. Beautiful poetry, even Shakespearean in style. But what does it mean in today’s English? The Jewish Publication Society’s (JPS) modern translation is as follows:

Whatever Sarah tells you, do as she says.

Do as she says. A bit stronger than hearken unto her voice, isn’t it? And this is God speaking. Our media-savvy Bible-thumping moralists never seem to quote that one: Do what your wife says.

So the language of the KJV can obscure meaning, and I’m willing to admit that on my first read-through, my sometimes rudimentary following of an unfamiliar narrative meant that the sudden depictions of violence seemed to leap at me from out of nowhere.

Like the assassination of King Eglon of Moab, whom we are told is “very fat,” with its startlingly specific detail:

And Ehud took the sword from his right thigh and thrust it into the king’s belly; and the haft went in after the blade, and the fat closed upon the blade so that he could not draw the weapon out, and the filth came out. (Judges 3:21-22)

The Hebrew is unclear, but the filth came out most likely means the king, upon receiving a mortal wound, loses control of his bowels and craps himself. Yeah, that’s in the Bible.

Then there’s an especially disturbing scene where a mob of men rape and abuse an unnamed woman all night long, leaving her for dead. When her husband finds her unresponsive the next morning, he heads home and cuts her body up into twelve parts and sends a part to each of the twelve tribal territories of Israel as a sign that “an outrageous act of depravity has been committed in Israel” (JPS, Judges 20:6). This leads to a devastating intertribal war that brings more rape, death and destruction.

But the violent event that stood out the most to me was the story of Jael (Ya’el in Hebrew), who kills a powerful warrior named Sisera by nailing his head to the ground with a mallet and tent peg. Needless to say, I did not see that coming.

Gustave Doré: Ya’el and Sisera

The whole incident is described in five short verses (Judges 4:17-21), then repeated with a bit more detail in the Song of Deborah (Judges 5). It’s worth noting that Bible scholars believe that The Song of Deborah and the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1-18) are among the oldest passages in the Bible, possibly dating from around 1000 BCE or even earlier.

Gustave Doré: The Song of Deborah

So who was this Ya’el? The text identifies her as the wife of Hever the Kenite, not as an Israelite, and we’re told that there was friendship between her husband and Sisera’s commander, King Yabin of Hatzor. So why does she do what she does? The Bible offers no explanation. In short, she has no motive.

Until now . . .

From that day, more than thirty years ago, I was determined to flesh out the story of Ya’el, but it wasn’t until recently, after doing extensive biblical and archeological research for my current novel-in-progress, that I finally had the background knowledge to expand on this brief biblical vignette.

As part of my research for a novel based on the story of one of the strongest women in the Bible, I re-read the Hebrew Bible (a.k.a. the Old Testament) along with a shelf-load of books of commentary ranging from the ultra-Orthodox Artscroll Mesorah series to a collection of essays by group of feminist rabbis.

One particularly provocative observation I learned from all this research is that the stereotypical biblical descriptions of women as the source of all that is evil and dirty (see: the Whore of Babylon) are almost entirely in the (ahem) New Testament. Women may not have much of a voice in the Old Testament, but when they do speak up, their demands are heard.

Do as she says.

Mount Tabor, scene of a decisive battle in Judges 4. (Image: © BiblePlaces.com)

I’ve always been attracted to strong female characters, and there are some mighty strong women in the Bible. (Deborah is depicted as being a stronger leader than a warrior named Barak, who appears to be her husband, until he assumes command of an army of ten thousand and charges down Mount Tabor in Judges 4.)  And I’m thrilled to have had the privilege of dramatizing this striking incident from a lawless era when there was no king over Israel and some kickass women had to take matters into their own hands.

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April 9, 2019 · 10:30 am

Franz Margitza on “Eulalia” and Writing in the Gothic Tradition

Franz Margitza is a Detroit native and director of research for a Cleveland TV station. Here he talks about his debut short story—”Eulalia,” from our current March/April 2019 issue—and about the appeal, attributes, and modern context of Gothic romance literature.

We were in a coffee shop when I mentioned that the issue would be released soon. She looked at me and warmly smiled, before raising her brow—baiting me to continue.

“What?” I asked.

“Go on—tell me what it’s about.”

“Ah, well, I supposed it’s a Gothic horror story.” I immediately saw the wheels in her head start turning. “Do you know what I mean by—Gothic?”

“Um, yeah—like The Cure,” she said.

“Not quite.”

I understood where she was coming from. To many, the word “gothic” can infer something very different. And soon, I began a very poor attempt at defining the tradition. Dark, decaying, brooding, ghosts, demons, passion, curses, and romance—these were some of the words I wanted to use, but nothing came out correctly. It was a jumbled mess.

And as I sat there, trying to explain the intense romanticism of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, or the sullen lament of the protagonist in “The Raven,” I found that I was not making much headway.

“These don’t sound like healthy relationships,” she said.

“They’re not.”

“So how are they romantic?”

It was the mystique that comes with the Gothic tradition that had inspired me to write my story featured in the March/April Issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, titled “Eulalia.” The inspiration began with the image of a chamber room, a bedroom in an antiquated abbey. In that room I imagined, was a large stained glass window, and directly below—the crypt of a lost love, entombed to be near the very bed she once shared with the narrator.

What kind of obsession would drive someone to bury their deceased love in the very room in which they slept? Is it a quality of love that would force someone to do so? Or maybe some sort of mental derangement? Then again, is there much of a difference? That can be debated. But I’ve always found the dark brooding Byronic hero to be a champion of romance.

“So what else is different about this kind of story?”

“The words,” I said. “The way it’s written. The style, more or less.”

There is a special quality in the diction used in Gothic literature that spoke to me. A musical quality, with an elaborate description of even the smallest details. The rhythm of the words, the lilting quality that remain with the reader, it’s all a part of the grand scheme. And to be quite honest, it almost felt as if I needed to overwrite—to over describe. To use words that, I must admit, I had to double-check in the dictionary just to be sure I had the correct definition in mind. And I thought back to my days in journalism school, when they took a red pen to every phrase, every word, and every letter that wasn’t essential to telling the most simplistic, concise story possible.

“Kill your babies,” my old professor would say. He was a tall, thin veteran newspaperman. And what he meant by kill your babies—or kill your darlings, as some refer to it—was to take out all the little things you love about your story, that don’t add to the overall message you’re trying to convey. Thereby, anything that is too descriptive, or flowery, must be omitted. As well as anything that sounds too cute, too creative, or too ornate. So, a sentence like “A fierce, turbulent squall brewed far off on the horizon, encroaching upon the barren landscape, like a violent tempest” essentially becomes: “It rained”—more or less, anyway.

Thus, my training was in vast opposition to the tradition of Gothic writing. And it was daunting to attempt to write in such a way. A way that I was taught not to write. However, the rhythm or the pulsing cadence is something I’ve always truly admired. And I tried my best to mimic that sound.

“So, is it really scary? Am I going to lose sleep at night?”

“No, I wouldn’t say so. It’s more creepy than scary. And mysterious.”

“Remind me again how it is romantic?”

“Well . . .”

But as I sat there sipping my coffee—I saw her point, and a question arose. Today, does Gothic romance still have its place? Can the Byronic hero still be viewed as heroic? Or is he simply an all-out villain? She followed up her question.

“What makes you think those characters you mentioned are in any way romantic?” she asked.

“The romance isn’t in the happy ending—no one goes off and lives happily ever after. For the most part, very few even actually live at the end of these stories, and some aren’t even alive when the story begins. But the heroes, well—they’ve found their soulmate, and they adhere to that as if it was their religion. The problem is—they’re addicted to love. And yes, as dangerous as that can be, there is also something vulnerable in that. They feel this insatiable need, and yet the universe decides not to comply with their wants. And so, they go on longing, for what could have been.” I let out a long breath, then added—“Y’know?”

There was silence. We both took a sip of our coffee. The sound of the rain was beating against the window of the coffee shop, and we both knew that soon we’d have to brave the nighttime storm that started on our way back to the car. A storm that might be describe as a fierce, turbulent squall . . . (and so on, and so on). Then, she spoke.

“It all sounds depressing.”

“A little.”

“So . . . in other words, it’s just like The Cure.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

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December 18, 2018 · 2:00 pm

Wrap Up a Mystery (January/February 2019)

It’s that time of the year, a season observed by many with an exchange of gifts. We hope you’ll consider this issue a neatly wrapped package of criminous cadeaux. Variety is always welcome in a bestowal of presents, and so this issue offers a range of delights from the humorous to the spooky; from the past to the present; from the poignant to the puzzling.

Among them: the seasonally-appropriate “Blue Christmas,” in which Melissa Yi’s doctor/sleuth Hope Sze is sitting down to a festive holiday dinner with coworkers when two people suddenly become deathly ill. “The Case of the Truculent Avocado” by Mark Thielman, in which a P.I. supplements his sporadic income with a part-time job dressing up as a potato. Shelly Dickson Carr’s clever tale “The Beacon Hill Suicide,” showcasing historic Boston. What to do about a slobbering dog is the question for a “cleaner” in Zandra Renwick’s “Dead Man’s Dog.” And “A Six-Pipe Problem” by proceduralist master John H. Dirckx.

Several tales pack a powerful emotional punch. A grieving widower in our cover story, Pamela Blackwood’s “Justice,” hears voices and barking late at night, only later learning the significance of those noises. A new tenant in a Queens apartment house unlocks troubling memories for a lonely neighbor in Devon Shepherd’s “The Woman in Apartment 615.” Another newcomer, in “The Man Across the Hall” by Janice Law, has a destabilizing effect on a young married couple in Miami. And Chicago P.I. Kubiak steps into a family drama when an old colleague from the police force asks him to follow his wife in Steve Lindley’s “A Matter of Trust and Surveillance.”

The uncanny and inexplicable also add zest to our holiday package. A pre-Sherlock Dr. J. H. Watson recounts an episode from his time in Afghanistan, revealing what really happened at the Battle of Kandahar in James Tipton’s “Shiva’s Eye.” And our mystery classic features that master of the ghost story, E. F. Benson, with “The Confession of Charles Linkworth.”

And so, best wishes for the season. Whether you’ve been naughty or nice, maybe you’ll find a little murder tucked into your stocking for your guilty pleasure.

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November 2, 2018 · 12:40 pm

Meditations on Murder (November/December 2018)

In our third annual Case File essay, Joseph Goodrich considers the music that puts him in the mood to murder—if only on the page. Meanwhile, in our November/December issue, a dozen thoughtful short story writers offer their own engaging meditations on a range of nefarious deeds.

An oft told ghost story that no longer scare the kids still may have its uses, as Max Gersh demonstrates in “The Week Before November.” Sharon Hunt’s “The Keepers of All Sins” considers a history of death by water for the men of a wealthy family. A young couple’s canoe trip reveals the horrifying truth of their relationship in our cover story, “Leah,” by Julie Tollefson. Multiple story lines converge (literally) on a snowy day in Robert Lopresti’s “A Bad Day of Algebra Tests.” A kid escapes one bad scene only to encounter more trouble in a lonely diner in Michael Bracken’s dark tale, “Going-Away Money.” The late Albert Ashforth’s retired spy Alex Klear is once again pressed into service, this time to check on an American operative in “Death of an Oligarch.” And R. T. Lawton’s Holiday Burglars have a new scheme in “Vet’s Day.”

A flashy young mogul has a tale of losing it all—Miami style—which he tells to Elaine Viets’s P.I. pair in “Mistress of the Mickey Finn.” Mitch Alderman’s central Florida P.I. Bubba Simms brings his considerable weight to bear as he tracks down the people responsible for vandalizing a women’s health clinic in “Fear of the Secular.” Across the globe in Beijing, Martin Limón’s Korean American P.I. Il Yong lands in a Beijing jail for a crime he didn’t commit, but his ticket out comes at a heavy price in “Bite of the Dragon.” The evidence wasn’t adding up in S. L. Franklin’s “Manitoba Postmortem,” so the Carr family detectives cross the border into Canada to get the real story. Susan Thibadeau’s amateur detectives, Pittsburgh attorney Harry Whiteside and his under-employed actor/cousin Jake, find their beloved housekeeper under suspicion of murder when she inherits a bookstore, and a feisty cat.

Plus brain-teaser puzzles, book reviews, and a new Mysterious Photograph contest await inside. You can also check out our blog Trace-Evidence.net for some story-behind-the-story insights. And if you’re in the mood for further reflection, you can use our annual index in this issue as a guide to all of our authors’ criminal creations. As we bring 2018 to a close, we can all reflect on what a great year it’s been for crime fiction, and for the magazines that publish the genre’s best short stories.

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May 8, 2018 · 11:00 am

Plots, Schemes, Entrapments (May/June 2018)

Killers and thieves in our midst try to stay undetected, whether clinging to shadows or hiding in plain sight. The tales in this issue feature intrepid, if sometimes accidental, sleuths who uncover what’s hidden and unmask the villains in surprising and entertaining ways.

Emily Devenport’s heroine Katie Thomas runs out of her condo in her pajamas because she knows a serial killer is stalking her, but her explanation to the police for how she knows beggars belief in “10,432 Serial Killers (in Hell)”. The late B. K. Stevens was a master craftsman of short fiction; in her story “One-Day Pass,” a ghost has one shot to reveal the truth and set things straight. Artist Tamar Gillespie brings her powers of keen observation to the painting of a portrait of three spoiled Pomeranians, which happen to belong to celebrity psychiatrists specializing in the criminal mind, in John C. Boland’s “The Three Dog Problem.” A laid-off copyeditor continues to review her former employer’s website, where she discovers some devastating information hidden in the errors in “Bothering with the Details” by Dayle A. Dermatis. Leslie Budewitz brings us a tale of Stagecoach Mary, the observant and crafty servant to the Ursaline sisters in the Montana Territory in “All God’s Sparrows.”

A ho-hum date at a corny mystery dinner gets interesting when one of the guests disappears in Tara Laskowski’s “The Case of the Vanishing Professor.” At another tense dinner, Deborah Lacy’s protagonist’s thoughts turn to “Taking Care.” Steve Liskow goes deep into the workings of a pickle packaging plant with “The Girl in the Red Bandana.” The death of a feline at the Temple of Bast in ancient Alexandria is a bad omen for Magistrate Ovid, who must solve the mystery before his friend, the inventor Heron, is put to death in “The Worth of Felines” by Thomas K. Carpenter. The provenance of a portrait of Saint Hedwig is at the heart of a puzzle that faces Abbot Joseph and Brother Leo in Marianne Wilski Strong’s new story, “The Abbot and the Garnets.” The heroine of Jane K. Cleland’s “I am a Proud American” discovers a mystery in the identity of her father. And John H. Dirckx returns with another solid procedural set at a perennial summer ritual in “Blowout at the Carnival.” Meanwhile, find out how crime lurks in the everyday aisles of the grocery store, in Neil Schofield’s “Shopping for Fun and Profit.”

In addition to Robert C. Hahn’s book reviews in our Booked & Printed column, and Dying Words, a challenging acrostic by Arlene Fisher, this issue’s features include the debut of a new puzzle, Mixed-Up Sleuths, anagram fun for mystery mavens from Mark Lagasse. We also bring you a special Mystery Classic: Shelly Dickson Carr introduces a short story by her mother Julia McNiven, “Death at Devil’s Hole,” originally published in 1974.

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March 27, 2018 · 9:30 am

“The Vegas Way” by Shauna Washington

Author and fashion consultant Shauna Washington’s first short-story case for Las Vegas stylist-sleuth Stacey Deshay appeared in the May 2012 issue of AHMM. Here she talks about the series’ Las Vegas setting and her story “Knockoffs,” from the current issue.

Well, I’d like to start on how I fell in the love with Las Vegas. It’s my hometown and over the decades it has changed both architecturally and culture-wise. It has many different monikers like Sin City, The Wedding Capital of the World, Adult Disneyland, City of Lights, but the name I recently heard on a returning flight home might be best: “Lost Wages.”

I like to think of Vegas as a glittery playground. There’s something for everyone, although everything isn’t for everybody. As a kid I loved the bright neon signs and lights. I didn’t frequent the casinos back then, and later found my way in the hospitality industry doing internships in everything from room reservations to cocktail service. I really loved the guest services. However, my first love is retail shopping.

I’m a fashionista. I’ve since become a personal shopper and styling consultant, working with all sorts of people: some famous and some not so famous locals, visitors, and Vegas socialites. Hence my amateur sleuth, Stacey Deshay, is too. Naturally, my stories are set in Las Vegas, but I try not to put them on the famous Las Vegas Strip. Like I said, Vegas is more than just that. There are some very cool places in the valley that I wanted write about. For instance, my first short story, “Fashioned for Murder,” was set in a gated bedroom community. Bad things can happen anywhere. Some of my other settings have been places I’ve visited such as McCarran Airport, the Neon Museum, and the skeletons of the Moulin Rouge nightclub, where Blacks performed in the segregated 1960s. Not all the places in my stories exist, though.

For “Knockoffs,” my short story in the March/April issue of AHMM, I created a fictional hotel on the Strip. I like to think of my stories as fashion mysteries, but there’s a mystery/detective element to them, too. You see, my grandfather was one of the first Black police officers in Las Vegas, and he rose to the rank of detective, so solving crimes in Vegas is sort of a family tradition.

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March 20, 2018 · 10:00 am

“One Last Job” by Michael Bracken

Fiction and nonfiction author Michael Bracken is the recipient of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2016 Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for lifetime achievement in crime fiction. He has also twice won the Derringer Award for short fiction. Here he talks about writing his story “The Mourning Man” from the current issue of AHMM.

Stories about a seasoned criminal’s “One Last Job”—a familiar trope in mystery fiction—often involve protagonists who desire retirement from their criminous careers. On occasion, “One Last Job” stories involve retired criminals roped back in through no desire of their own, and that is the structural framework for “The Mourning Man” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March/April 2018).

But that isn’t the story I planned to write. I planned to write a love story.

I have known several men of a certain age who find themselves lost after the death of their spouse. They haven’t shopped, cooked, cleaned, or done laundry in so many years that basic self-care eludes them. When I wrote the opening scene of “The Mourning Man,” I had all those men in mind, but I also remembered how I felt twenty-four years ago when my wife passed away after a protracted battle with cervical cancer and I found myself without sufficient savings to pay for her funeral.

I was lucky. Family stepped in. But what if Johnny Devlin—a cab driver who just lost the love of his life, the woman who convinced him to abandon crime when he was young and who kept him on the straight and narrow during the decades since—borrowed funeral money from a loan shark?

The question remained unanswered and the rough draft of my opening scene remained untouched until I read “Chronic Insecurity,” an article by William Wheeler in the July/August 2014 Playboy about the legal marijuana shops in Denver and the problems marijuana dispensers everywhere have banking their money. Wheeler quoted the owner of one dispensary who referred to a two-block stretch of Broadway in Denver that houses a dozen marijuana dispensaries as “Retard Row.” I thought those shops were ripe for robbery, and so does the loan shark who provides the money to bury Devlin’s wife.

Devlin finds himself torn between his debt, the promises he made to his dead wife, and the needs of his living friends and relatives. In the end, even though I used the tropes of the “One Last Job” story, I think I did write a love story because the decisions Devlin makes demonstrate his love for his wife, his friends, and his family.

 

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January 8, 2018 · 11:00 am

On “The Chinese Dog Mystery” by James Lincoln Warren

James Lincoln Warren is a Black Orchid Novella Award winner and prolific author of series as well as standalone short stories. Here, he talks about his story “The Chinese Dog Mystery” from the current issue of AHMM.

In the cover comments I submitted with “The Chinese Dog Mystery” to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, I described the story as a love letter to P.G. Wodehouse, the inimitable creator of that dimwitted but kind-hearted scion of the British gentry, Bertie Wooster, and his towering genius of a valet, the formidable Jeeves, for both of whom time all but stopped in the 1920s, even if it was the 30s or the 40s or the 50s.

Wodehouse is one of those rare authors who makes me laugh out loud when I read silently along. He’s one of my literary heroes.

I have always wanted to follow in his footsteps, as we all want to do with our heroes, and so to do my own take on the Wooster/Jeeves paradigm. But there was, I thought, an insurmountable barrier to doing so: If a writer is truly inimitable, then by definition he is utterly impossible to imitate, let alone duplicate. Especially regarding style, that most defining characteristic of a great writer, and as almost all of the Jeeves catalogue is written in the first person from Bertie’s point of view, that style is inextricably Bertie’s, which is to say Wodehouse’s, very own.

But faint heart never won fair whatever.

The challenge was to find a suitable replacement voice to put in the mouth of my Bertie analog, E. Cowes Crambury, a.k.a. “Bennie”—to find a voice that would convey Bennie’s amusing idiocy without merely parroting Bertie’s, with his signature What-ho!s and I-mean-to-say-what?s and the like, which add so much to Wodehouse’s gentle humor.

How to proceed? And then, as through a glass darkly, I recognized that I had a slight, albeit very slight, advantage.

You see, Bertie, like Wodehouse, was an Englishman—but Bennie, like me, is thoroughly American.

Q: What do American twits sound like?

A: A lot like English twits, I suppose, twittishness being no respecter of national origins—but not in English English, as in, “Hail, Good Fellow; Well Met!” Rather, it ought to be in American English, as in, “Howdy, Pardner; Happy to Meetcha!”

A character’s voice comes from two sources: the character’s personality and his formative environment. In Bertie’s case, he’s a young English gentleman of independent means who’s at one with a Roaring 20s background. Where might I find something analogous on this side of the pond? I suppose it was an inspiration, because it came to me immediately without me even thinking about it.

I decided to make Bennie a young American trust fund baby of not-entirely savory antecedents, and with a Golden Age of Hollywood background—movie stars being the closest thing the U.S. has to an aristocracy.

Instead of using Bertie’s most whimsical jazz age expressions and English slang, I had Bennie talk mostly in an American vernacular, and threw in a bunch of 1940s American pop culture references that would be wholly out of place in London, but perfect for L.A.

And remaining true to my quest, I made sure that Bertie and Bennie are enough alike so that the Wodehouse touch is clearly detectible, especially as I included the required Wodehousean ingredients, including a Jeeves-type servant savant (a chauffeur, though, not a valet—this is Hollywood, remember) and a sensible, talented, pretty girl to keep Bennie completely confused.

And when it all came together, I knew I had it. It ain’t as fine as Wodehouse, of course it isn’t, it never could be. But my love for him is there, and that’s why I wrote it.

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October 14, 2014 · 2:36 pm

In Extremis

Mystery stories are often driven by people in dire straits—such as an accountant standing on a skyscraper ledge, waving a pistol. That’s the crisis facing Loren D. Estleman’s resourceful Four Horsemen police squad in “Tin Cop.” Meanwhile, broken ex-Wall Streeter Pit Geller finds himself holed up in Las Vegas with a family torn apart by a dead guy in John Gregory Betancourt’s “Pit and the Princess.” Jay Carey imagines policing a future Sarasota, Florida ravaged by global warming, destructive storms, and crumbling infrastructure in “We Are Not Insured Against Murder.” A literary publisher finds himself at the end of a rope—specifically, a noose—in John C. Boland’s “The Man Who Stole Trocchi.” A curious “curator” roaming Europe is unaware of the wolves at his heels in Stephen Ross’s “Gallery of the Dead.” And B. K. Stevens closes out her long-running series featuring Lieutenant Walt Johnson and Sergeant Gordon Bolt this month in “True Enough: Bolt’s Last Case.” To mark this transition, watch this blog space for the author’s reflections on her decision to say goodbye to one series and start another.

Plus we bring you a bit of espionage when radio producer Margo Banning visits a munitions factory in “Margo and the Locked Room” by Terence Faherty. John H. Dirckx, well known to AHMM readers for his Cyrus Auburn procedurals, translates and introduces this month’s Mystery Classic, “Justice by the Book” by Pedro de Alarcón. Finally, Robert C. Hahn introduces us to a new crop of bibliomysteries in his Booked & Printed column.

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