Customer Reviews

The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Fine literary writing - compiled under one cover so you don't have to read every magazine out there. James Lee Burke. Michael Connelly. Intriguing stories. Excellent writing. Worth the read.

The Best American Mystery Stories series is consistantly one of the best short story anthologies of the year and this is no exception. This year's collection offers many traditional favorite writers as well as a few surprises. A must for short story lovers!

This book was a big disappointment to me. I thought it would be great intriguing mystery stories. Instead it is short stories that are not really mystery stories. Just disturbing short stories. If you are a literary hi-brow person, you may appreciate these stories. But if you are just a traditional mystery story lover, this book will disappoint.

The selection of mysteries for the book is very good, and they provide a quick read for they are interesting.

This is the 2008 version of this annual compilation of the best mystery stories of the year. The series editor is Otto Penzler and each year has an individual editor. The editor for 2008 is George Pelecanos. This series has been running since 1997.

In the 2008 edition, both well-known names in mystery and suspense as well as those less familiar to the reader are featured. Authors include James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, Robert Ferrigno, Chuck Hogan, Rupert Holmes, Holly Goddard Jones, Peter Lasalle, Kyle Minor, Alice Munro, Thisbe Nissen,
Joyce Carol Oates, Nathan Oates, Jas. R. Petrin, Scott Phillips, Stephen Rhodes, S.J. Rozan, Hugh Sheehy, Elizabeth Strout, Melissa Vanbeck and Scott Wolven.

Every mystery reader can find a story represented here in the genre they like best. Victorian mysteries, hard-core detectives, puzzlers, offbeat mysteries; all are here. Elizabeth Strout's story will be recognized by those who later read her bestseller, Olive Kittridge, as it is a vignette from that book.

My personal favorite was an offbeat mystery called Given Her History by Melissa Vanbeck. It is an offbeat story of a girl touched by death and taken in by a quirky woman who treats her much better than her family ever did. This book is recommended for lovers of short stories and mystery readers.

Rarely do I give up on a book part through, but what a stinker. There are no mystery stories, just tales of people with messed up lives, messed up relatives, and messed up friends who all meet a bad end. And, boy, do they deserve a bad end. Pelecanos, the editor, should get out of the mystery writing game (his past few novels were poor) and get on "the tragedies of people who deserve it" milieu.

As the foreword to the collection mentions, there are no locked-room mysteries in this book. What it doesn't mention is that it doesn't contain any other kinds of mysteries either. This book is like a box of fancy chocolates that turns out to be full of trail mix with a few M&Ms thrown in.

This collection of 20 "mystery stories" had some selections of interest, but none of the stories were what I would describe as truly engaging. The text of the stories filled 407 pages, so each piece was about 20 pages in length. "Mulholland Drive" recounted a tale of an auto accident investigator in CA who had his own agenda, and the story takes an ironic twist at the end. "Hothouse" presents the adventures of a jail escapee who hides in a park and gets cornered in a large greenhouse. "Car Trouble" involves a detective investigating a case. I found that in these and other stories the authors seemed not to make much effort to have a novel or intriguing plot, but instead they settled for a rather routine or simple plot but then emphasized the description of the characters or their feelings. Perhaps I was asking for too much in these short pieces, but I was hoping for better plots.

The title is misleading. There are very few 'mysteries' in this collection. Even though the stories are well written and occasionally clever, they are just short stories and belong in a different anthology.

I wish I had read the editor's introduction before I spent money on this. He acknowledges that he just picked the stories for their writing. Time to get another editor.

I did not finish reading about half of the stories in this collection. They are mostly bad short stories, though there are a few winners. The bad ones are exercises of narcissistic depravity or just disturbing puzzlements. I did not feel that I got my money's worth, and will not be buying other years' versions.