You can learn a lot from murder (at least, the entertaining kind you find in these pages). The psychology of the calculating criminal, the explosiveness of the crime of passion, the cool rationality of the investigator, or the emotional fallout of the event all offer the reader valuable lessons in human nature and its passions. Here for your edification, then, are fourteen tales of murder and mayhem: School is in session.

A veteran of grief and homelessness schools a widower on important life lessons in the face of despair in Mark Thielman’s “Streetwise.” Kevin Egan’s court officer checks in on a colleague’s freshman son and discovers a scam targeting naïve students in “Foxx Goes to College.”

Margo and the Femme Fatale
by Terence Faherty

“The next time the station is passing out free Dodgers tickets, Miss Banning, keep me in mind.”

Margo, the Banning addressed, stopped in mid stride. “I beg your pardon,” she said.

She liked the man who’d stopped her, Sid Matthews, one of the panelists on the radio show she oversaw, Gotham Goings On. Matthews was a moonlighting sports columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, who reminded Margo of her grandfather, being short and gray and liberally sprinkled with cigar ash, and he was the least troublesome of the show’s three regulars. The least temperamental, as well. Even this remark about free tickets, which would have sounded like a complaint if Mamie Gallagher, Gotham’s statuesque show business expert, had made it, was merely a pleasant greeting from the smiling Matthews. READ MORE

Dark Equation
by Michael Nethercott

On that cold day in the fall of 2000, Burt Lentz had been in a rancid mood even before the gunmen stormed in. Starting with the commute to work, the day had gone against him. As evidence: the bottleneck on 495; the coffee spilt in his lap; the sudden, blinding rain burst and the defective windshield wipers. Then, as he marched across the parking lot of the community college, the folder under his arm slipped open, dumping half the corrected exams into a fresh puddle of rainwater. Lentz cursed, scooped up the dripping papers, and muttered, “Perfect, just perfect.”

Even though he was running late, only three of his students had arrived before him. These few had positioned themselves as far away from each other as possible, and only one—round, white-haired Mrs. Peller—offered him a hello. For his part, Lentz merely nodded and grunted noncommittally. READ MORE