Darwin Minor travels a dangerous road. A Vietnam veteran turned reluctant expert on interpreting the wreckage of fatal accidents, Darwin uses science and instinct to unravel the real causes of unnatural disasters. He is very, very good at his job. His latest case promises to be his most challenging yet. A spate of seemingly random high-speed car accidents has struck the highways of southern California. Each seems to have been staged-yet the participants...

An Otto Penzler Book The need for love-obsessive, self-destructive, unpredictable-takes us to forbidden places, as in the chilling world of Give Me Your Heart, a new collection of stories by the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates. In the suspenseful "Strip Poker," a reckless adolescent girl must find a way of turning the tables on a gathering of increasingly threatening young men-Can she "outplay" them? In the award-winning "Smother!" a young woman's...

Five stories engagingly reveal Poe₂s virtuoso gifts for both crime detection and the macabre. Two of his most famous tales, "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter" introduce C. Auguste Dupin, the first fictional detective. "William Wilson" is a chilling tale of crime and evil. Also included: two tales of terror: "MS. Found in a Bottle" and "The Oblong Box."

In his more than three dozen books, Elmore Leonard has captured the imagination of millions of readers as few writers can. A literary icon praised by The New York Times Book Review as "the greatest crime writer of our time, perhaps ever," he has influenced many contemporary writers and is known for both the quality and the accessibility of his writing. In this collection of new and recently published short fiction, Leonard demonstrates the superb...

When it comes to Florida, no crime is too unusual and no criminal too peculiar to be impossible. Florida is the one state where fiction has to catch up to the headlines, and the contributors to FLORIDA HAPPENS: Tales of Murder, Mayhem, and Suspense from The Sunshine State do not hold back!

"New York Times best-selling author of ten genre-bending novels Jonathan Lethem helms this collection of the year's best mystery short fiction."--Provided by publisher. For Jonathan Lethem, "crime stories are deep species gossip." He writes in his introduction that "they're fundamentally stories of power, of its exercise, both spontaneous and conspiratorial; stories of impulse and desire, and of the turning of tables." The Best American Mystery Stories...