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andrew_petro's review
2.0
I didn't like this collection as much as previous years. It delivered more on the editor's premise that mystery genre stories need not have any mystery in them. That is, some of the stories are just stories involving a crime. The awful violence outside the context of a mystery is, well, unredeemed, and less appealing.
scorpstar77's review
4.0
Prior to getting this from the Virginia Festival of the Book office to read as a reviewer of book applications for their planning committee, I had no idea that the famous "Best American" series had a mystery subgenre. I mostly enjoyed this collection, though I think the title calling them all "mystery stories" is rather misleading. In his introduction, the series editor - the well-known mystery editor and aficionado Otto Penzler - states that it's really a collection of both mystery and crime stories. OK, I can still get behind that. The two are closely related and often lumped together.
But it seemed to the me that the editors had a rather broader definition than I would have had for what constitutes a crime story. For example, in one story entitled "Trafficking," the crux of the story is the complex family relationships in a blended family (mother and son, step-father and step-son) when the parents have aged/died and the brothers have grown up and chosen different paths in life. The entire story is about one step-brother visiting the other in prison. Why the one brother is in prison is only very vaguely defined (something drug-related) and is ultimately unimportant. It's not a bad story; I just would not have classified it as a crime story.
Anyway - most of the authors here are fairly well-known, and those who aren't have still been published in respectable venues before. Most of the stories were quite good. I wouldn't necessarily have classified all of them as crime stories, but most are at least that - with a crime or multiple crimes playing a pivotal role in the storytelling - and a few are quite satisfying mysteries. Personal favorites in the collection: "The Bridge Partner" by Peter S. Beagle; "Dog on a Cow" by Gina Paoli; "Vic Primeval" by T. Jefferson Parker; "Hard Truths" by Thomas J. Rice; "Local Knowledge" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; and "Trafalgar" by Charles Todd. The last two stories listed are probably the most traditional whodunit kinds of mysteries in the book, the first a kind of hard-boiled American police procedural and the second a more old-fashioned British police investigation (though I can't quite call it a cozy since it is an investigation run by Scotland Yard, there are some cozy elements to it).
But it seemed to the me that the editors had a rather broader definition than I would have had for what constitutes a crime story. For example, in one story entitled "Trafficking," the crux of the story is the complex family relationships in a blended family (mother and son, step-father and step-son) when the parents have aged/died and the brothers have grown up and chosen different paths in life. The entire story is about one step-brother visiting the other in prison. Why the one brother is in prison is only very vaguely defined (something drug-related) and is ultimately unimportant. It's not a bad story; I just would not have classified it as a crime story.
Anyway - most of the authors here are fairly well-known, and those who aren't have still been published in respectable venues before. Most of the stories were quite good. I wouldn't necessarily have classified all of them as crime stories, but most are at least that - with a crime or multiple crimes playing a pivotal role in the storytelling - and a few are quite satisfying mysteries. Personal favorites in the collection: "The Bridge Partner" by Peter S. Beagle; "Dog on a Cow" by Gina Paoli; "Vic Primeval" by T. Jefferson Parker; "Hard Truths" by Thomas J. Rice; "Local Knowledge" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; and "Trafalgar" by Charles Todd. The last two stories listed are probably the most traditional whodunit kinds of mysteries in the book, the first a kind of hard-boiled American police procedural and the second a more old-fashioned British police investigation (though I can't quite call it a cozy since it is an investigation run by Scotland Yard, there are some cozy elements to it).
spygrl1's review against another edition
3.0
My favorite story is Thomas McGuane's "The Good Samaritan," which includes this:
"Telling people to relax is not as aggressive as shooting them, but it's up there."
"Telling people to relax is not as aggressive as shooting them, but it's up there."
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