Otto Penzler

"With so many great authors contributing to this fiction collection . . . it doesn't take detecting skills to discover the gem. And every story dazzles . . . These stories, in prose both elegant and compelling, get to the heart of why people do what they do." — USA Today

The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 will be selected by "writing powerhouse" (USA Today) Laura Lippman. With her popular Tess Monaghan series and

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This year’s worth of the most powerful, the most startling, the smartest and most astute, in short, the best crime journalism. Scouring hundreds of publications, Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook have created a remarkable compilation containing the best examples of the most current and vibrant of our literary traditions: crime reporting.
Included in this volume are Maximillian Potter’s “The Body Farm” from GQ, a portrait...

The biggest collection of Sherlock Holmes stories ever assembled!
Arguably no other character in history has been so enduringly popular as Sherlock Holmes. Ever since his first appearance, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1887 novella A Study in Scarlet, readers have loved reading about him almost as much as writers have loved writing about him. 
Here, Otto Penzler collects eighty-three wonderful stories about Sherlock...

The bait is half of a $10,000 bill, delivered to Perry Mason by a man who promises the second half of the note should his companion, a silent masked woman, ever require the lawyer's services. When a dead body is discovered soon after, Mason feels the hook--but how can one prove the innocence of a person whose identity is unknown?

"The offices of foreign literature publisher and renowned stamp collector Donald Kirk are often host to strange activities, but the most recent occurrence the murder of an unknown caller, found dead in an empty waiting room is unlike any that has come before. Nobody, it seems, entered or exited the room, and yet the crime scene clearly has been manipulated, leaving everything in the room turned backwards and upside down. Stuck through the back of...

"When a washed up Hollywood cowboy-turned-circus rodeo actor is shot dead in the midst of his performance at a New York sports-palace, in front of thousands of onlookers, it seems obvious that someone would have seen the perpetrator of the crime--or at the very least, recovered the gun. But when the ensuing investigation fails to turn up any evidence, even after the newsreels made in the moment are reviewed, the net of suspicion widens across the...

"Meet Asey Mayo, Cape Cod's answer to Sherlock Holmes. Settled down from his former life as a seafaring adventurer, Asey is a Jack-of-all-trades who uses his worldly knowledge, folksy wisdom, and plain common sense to solve the most puzzling crimes to strike the peninsula. And in this, his first case, Asey finds himself embroiled in a scandal that will push his deductive powers to their limits. A massive heatwave is scorching the Northeast, and vacationers...

Features over fifteen mystery short stories set during Christmas, with some of the action taking place at the editor's real-life Mysterious Bookshop in New York City.

"At the hand of an outrageous prankster, top hats are going missing all over London, snatched from the heads of some of the city's most powerful people. But is the hat thief the same as the person responsible for stealing the lost story by Edgar Allan Poe, purloined from a private collection, which Dr. Gideon Fell has just been hired to retrieve? Unlike the manuscript, the hats don't stay stolen for long; each one reappears in unexpected and conspicuous...