Getting trapped is a primal fear, and our modern world offers no reprieve. Daily we’re caught in traffic jams, shut up in elevators, chained to a desk, and for some, nabbed by the police. Nor are we free of psychological traps: abusive relationships, obsessions and compulsions, and cycles of revenge. Fiction is one way to work through your fears, and this issue of AHMM offers some thrilling stories of entrapment and escape—our means of ensnaring you in our pages.
In our cover story by Joslyn Chase, a young woman must leave her Yorkshire home to work at her uncle’s Whitechapel pub, “The Wolf and Lamb,” during the terror wrought by Jack the Ripper. Joseph Walker describes the desperate journey of a woman escaping an abusive marriage in “Etta at the End of the World.” Three characters revisit the heady days of college—and the jealousies that festered for thirty-five years—in Elizabeth Zelvin’s “Reunion.” A private jet on the way to a corporate retreat is the setting for Ken Brosky’s locked-room story, “Airless Confinement.” In 1920s New York City, a shoeshine gets caught up in another man’s betting scheme in “Probable Cause” by John G. Wimer.
Meanwhile, real estate and revenge motivate the characters of Sarah Weinman’s “Limited Liability,” and Janice Law’s prim widow takes justice into her own hands years after the death of her husband in “The Client.” Bob Tippee’s executive draws on his own character failings for drastic ends in “A Bias for Action,” while Officer Grant Tripp’s brother falls under suspicion for a string of robberies in Eve Fisher’s “Brother’s Keeper.” And the perpipatetic Buck and Wiley return in Parker Littlewood’s “Buck Solves the Case,” while two girls find the body of a drowned bank robber in Michael Bracken’s “Sleepy River.”
This issue also offers whodunits featuring distinctive PIs. Jeff Cohen’s Samuel Hoenig finds that his experience of being on the autism spectrum gives him an edge in parsing the cryptic statements of a young man awaiting trial for murder in “The Question of the Befuddled Judge.” Mark Thielman’s handsome PI—known as the Spud Stud for his side work as a special assistant in potato promotion—solves the murder of a natural foods store manager in “The Case of the Cereal Killer.” The mystery writer Shanks is called to locate old associates of a wealthy music producer on the eve of his death in Rob Lopresti’s “Shanks Saves the World.”
Finally, we are delighted to introduce a new feature, knowing that our readers often take a keen interest in the realities behind the fiction: former police detective Lee Lofland will offer in each issue insights into the working lives and daily realities of those involved in law enforcement.
I love killing people in ships from the age of sail.
Trace Evidence 