Revealed in our May issue: The winners of the 2008 Readers Award! And the wide-ranging stories in this issue include a puzzling case of murder and “Identity Theft” for Jon Breen’s detectives Berwanger and Foley; a tongue-in-cheek snapshot of a demonic bureaucrat’s daily life in Hell, in Marilyn Todd’s “667, Evil and Then Some;” a married couple falling apart after their move to France in Caroline Benton’s “L’Etang du Diable;” a new case for Terence Faherty’s 1950s Hollywood PI Scott Elliott, in “Unruly Jade”; and Christopher Bundy’s “For the Love of Mary Hooks,” an evocative historical tale about a Beatles-obsessed teen in small-town Georgia.
Jack Fredrickson’s “For the Jingle” features PI Dek Elstrom investigating a vagrant’s “accidental” death in a blaze; and Patricia McFall offers a different type of PI in Lane Terry, who tracks down a runaway girl not much younger than herself in “Off Paper.” Bev Vincent’s “Wake Me Up For Meals” centers on a grifter who charms his way onto a New Hampshire bus tour—and into cahoots with the tour guide. Brian MuirBlake Crouch’s illustrates the bizarre relationship between two lounge performers in “Dummy.” A camping trip is marred by past misdeeds revealed in “Shining Rock,” and Argentinean Macéias Nunes makes his English-language fiction debut in our Passport to Crime department with a short, unsettling post-WWII tale.
