Anthologies

Finally: the perfect stocking stuffer for the crime fiction lover in your life! With a foreword by CWA Diamond Award-winner Peter Lovesey, these eighteen delightful holiday stories by your favorite Soho Crime authors contain laughs, murders, and plenty more. This captivating collection, which features bestselling and award-winning authors, contains laughs aplenty, the most hardboiled of holiday noir, and heartwarming  reminders of the spirit of the season. Nine mall Santas must find the imposter among them. An elderly lady seeks peace from her murderously loud neighbors at Christmastime. A young woman receives a mysterious invitation to Christmas dinner with a stranger. Niccolò Machiavelli sets out to save an Italian city. Sherlock Holmes’s one-time nemesis Irene Adler finds herself in an unexpected tangle in Paris while on a routine espionage assignment. Jane Austen searches for the Dowager Duchess of Wilborough’s stolen diamonds. These and other adventures in this delectable volume will whisk readers away to Christmases around the globe, from a Korean War POW camp to a Copenhagen refugee squat, from a palatial hotel in 1920s Bombay to a crumbling mansion in Havana. Includes Stories By (In Order of Appearance): Helene Tursten, Mick Herron, Martin Limón, Timothy Hallinan, Teresa Dovalpage, Mette Ivie Harrison, Colin Cotterill, Ed Lin, Stuart Neville, Tod Goldberg, Henry Chang, James R. Benn, Lene Kaaberbøl & Agnete Friis, Sujata Massey, Gary Corby, Cara Black, Stephanie Barron and a Foreword and story by Peter Lovesey.

September-October 2021. What loyalty do you owe and to whom? Family, friends, neighbors, community, society? Many of the stories in this issue explore the complicated demands of these bonds of blood and affection. In our cover story, “Glass” by James R. Benn, an uncle and nephew find their loyalty tested when an unlikely stroke of luck hands them the means to wealth and success. In R. T. Lawton’s “Gnawing at the Cat’s Tail,” the young son of a warlord in the opium trade survives internecine conflict with the aid of an unlikely ally. A teacher’s summer work operating an ice-cream truck draws unwanted attention from her landlord in “Ice Ice Baby,” by Barb Goffman. In “Blindsided,” cowritten by Michael Bracken and James A. Hearn, a college football player must question his loyalty to a teammate. During the Vietnam War, a sergeant stands up for his colonel when the officer is accused of murder in “Raining” by Peter Colt. In Robert Lopresti’s “Taxonomy Lesson,” an academic dalliance goes off the tracks at an important conference. Set among the Haliwa community of North Carolina, a white writer opens up old wounds when he tries to track down a womanizer from the fifties in “Ju Ju” by L. A. Wilson, Jr. Also in this issue, “No God West of Hays,” by Eric Ruark, John C. Boland’s “Paris Green”, Wayne J. Gardiner's “A Hell of a Thing . . .”, “The Shoemaker’s Children” by Tom Savage, “The Map Dot Murder” by Mark Thielman, and finally we welcome Floyd Sullivan in this issue with “The Beano.” Lee Lofland explains the complexities of grand juries in his Case Files column. Plus book reviews, puzzles, and more!