The Best American Mystery Stories 2011 [Paperback]

The Best American Series®
First, Best, and Best-Selling

The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected—and most popular—of its kind.
The excellent 15th edition of this best of series, edited by myster maven Otto Penzler, contains 20 winning short stories, many by relative unknowns. Among the standouts are Brendan DuBois’s Ride-Along, in which a veteran cop and a freelance reporter get involved in a robbery, and Beth Ann Fennelly and Tom Franklin’s What His Hands Had Been Waiting For, in which the struggle for survival in the Mississippi Delta during the terrible 1927 flood takes a strange turn. In Ed Gorman’smemorable Flying Solo, two old men dying of cancer make the most of their last days. As in previous volumes, it’s hard to find lighter fare, but S.J. Rozan’s clever Chin Yong-Yun Takes a Case is a beautifully crafted and satisfying tale of amateur detection. Other contributors include such pros as Lawrence Block, Loren D. Estleman, and Mickey Spillane and Max Collins. --STARRED Publishers Weekly

Ranging from homespun to lush and tropical, this year’s crop of 20 stories offers a variety of tastes and textures.

But exotic doesn’t always mean cl