Tag Archives: Tara Laskowski

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.

Dark Recesses (November/December 2017)

As the days grow short and winter looms, the lengthening evenings offer ample time and reason to brood over the nature of darkness. As the stories in this issue attest, a landscape of shadows offers far too many opportunities for both deception and misperception.

One skilled navigator of the shadows is post-war Manhattan private investigator Memphis Red, who confronts shifting motivations, political alliances, and even identities in L. A. Wilson Jr.’s “Harlem Nocturne.” Meanwhile, a young woman who seeks the shadows, trying to escape the consequences of a one-time lapse in judgment, finds she can’t escape those determined to find her in S. L. Franklin’s “Damsels in Distress.” And the shadow of calamity, in the form of drought, leaves a western town vulnerable to a charismatic, and dangerous, itinerant preacher in Gilbert Stack’s “Pandora’s Hoax.”

The idea of the serial killer casts its own dreadful shadow, as the residents of Laskin, South Dakota find in Eve Fisher’s “Darkness Visible.” The neighbors in Robert S. Levinson’s “The House Across the Street” also know a little something about serial killers—and they’re willing to share. And speaking of neighbors, a suspected witch in Kilgore, Texas beguiles her hapless neighbor in William Dylan Powell’s “The Darkness and the Light.”

Photographer Anita Ray takes up the cause of an American mathematician-turned-nun who is brutally attacked but who refuses to talk to the police in Susan Oleksiw’s “A Slight Deviation from the Mean.” And Tara Laskowski gets into the head of another woman in a brutal situation in her short-short “Hostage.”

To mitigate the darkness a bit, mid-level coworkers wreak their own special brand of havoc in plain sight in Robert Lopresti’s “The Chair Thief,” while R. T. Lawton’s Holiday Burglars return in “Black Friday,” where they must face up to their competition.

Each of B. K. Stevens’s Leah Abrams mysteries take place around a different Jewish holiday, and “Death Under Construction” is set during the fall harvest festival of Sukkot. Leah takes a temp job at a firm that makes luxury doghouses while she works on her academic tome on workplace communications, so she is receptive to the subtle clues when the firm’s manger is killed in the storeroom.

We welcome back to these pages Carol Cail, with her tale of mysterious goings-on and hidden rooms at a seniors’ community in “Ghost Busters.” And we welcome Anna Castle, whose first story for us is “For Want of a Book,” featuring a young Francis Bacon.

This issue also features the second installment of our new feature The Case Files: this time, Steve Hockensmith brings to light some cutting-edge mystery-related podcasts. We’re sure you’ll want to check them out.

So there’s no need to be afraid of the dark when you have such a substantial issue of great stories with which to while away the evenings.

How’d That Happen: Tara Laskowski

The author of the short story collection Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons, Tara Laskowski makes her AHMM debut in the April issue, where she explores the eerie undercurrents of our everyday lives in her story “The Monitor.”

When my husband and I first started using our baby monitor, there was something about the grainy picture and the way our son’s eyes glowed greenly in the infrared light that used to always give me the shivers. “What would you do,” I asked my husband one night, “if you suddenly saw someone in the room with Dash?” That conversation evolved quickly into ridiculousness (What if it was someone crawling in the window? What if it was an old lady or a big cat? What if it was a child? What if Dash started hovering?), but there was something deliciously scary and also weirdly plausible about the whole thing.

Having a new baby around the house turns everything upside down—you’re already on edge, deprived of sleep, emotionally up-and-down. Throw something like a creepy baby monitor into the mix and all bets are off.

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Tagged as Tara Laskowski

Tag Archives: Tara Laskowski

Plots, Schemes, Entrapments (May/June 2018)

Dark Recesses (November/December 2017)

How’d That Happen: Tara Laskowski

Links of Interest

Under Surveillance