Current Issue Highlights
OUT IN THE COLD
Holiday lights and dark endless nights. Winter is a season of contrasts. December festivities and soft new snow give way to dreary days that dissolve into gloom and slippery gray ice. After the parties and presents come introspection and dreams of an escape to the tropics. But if your fantasies come tinged with the macabre, stop right there and let us give you a vicarious dose with 14 tales of cold-hearted misdeeds.
In this winter issue we bring you four holiday-set stories. “Santa’s Eyes” by Joslyn Chase features a dubious department store you-know-who. An armed robbery threatens to derail Christmas dinner in “King of the Visigoths” by Marcelle Dubé. Crime doesn’t stop for the holiday on a gambling riverboat in “Rogue’s Christmas” by Christopher Latragna. The peace that follows the holidays is disrupted when a body is found the bell tower of a church in Jillian Grant Shoichet’s “The Toll.”
In rural Vermont, an elderly woman’s hit and run leads to revelations of more misdeeds in “Into the Weeds” by Alice Hatcher, while in neighboring New Hampshire, a White Mountain lodge hosts more than its paying guests in G.M. Malliet’s “Cold Cases.” What caused an experienced ice-fisherman in Greenland to drown is a question for the police in “Strange Fish” by Christoffer Petersen.
Photographer Rick Peters once again aids the police when a young woman dies at a concert in “The Girl in the Pit” by Floyd Sullivan. The pro shop owner at a country club delves into the messy family dynamics of a legendary golf club maker in “The Guardianship of Willie Musselburgh” by Kevin Egan. In Bob Tippee’s “Misplaced Placement,” private investigators track the thefts of a small company’s proprietary information. And a WWII vet with PTSD stumbles onto a murder and becomes an accidental P.I. in Michael Mallory’s “The Eyes That Won’t Die.”
An ex-television superhero is reduced to ribbon-cutting at a car dealership in “The Nine Lives of Dr. Impossible,” by James A. Hearn. A young truck driver and avid pinball player acts as a runner between the Mob and a flashy preacher in “Goody and the Bishop” by Jim Fusilli. A woman alone in her house is visited by an escaped convict in John M. Floyd’s “The Cado Devil.”
There’s nothing like murder and mayhem to keep you warm on a long winter’s night.
FICTION
The Girl in the Pit
by Floyd Sullivan
Detective Paul Wilson called early one morning. He wanted me to meet him later at a coffee shop on Lincoln Avenue.
“Am I in trouble?” I asked.
“If you were in trouble,” he said, “I’d be outside your door with handcuffs. No. I need your help. I understand you worked the Caldwell concert last Saturday.”
“Yeah, I did. Tough gig. That poor girl.”
“That’s what I need to talk to you about.” READ MORE
Into the Weeds
by Alice Hatcher
The hardest thing about being a small-town cop in northern Vermont is that, most days, you don’t do much, and on the days you do, no one wants to know what you did. On a typical day, I’m issuing speeding tickets to tourists flying down back roads in BMWs and Audis—we call them moose bait—on their way to lake houses and ski resorts. Other days, I’m responding to domestic violence calls, administering Narcan to overdoses, arresting drunk drivers, or securing the scenes of car crashes, hunting accidents, and suicides. I mop up after local tragedies, and there’s no one to talk about it with. No one wants to hear gruesome details about victims they knew, or ugly stories about people they’ll run into at the grocery store. It’s too much horror too close to home. If I’m dealing with a body, I call in the State Police. Otherwise, I work alone. I’m not part of a local police force; I am the local police force, and I probably spend too much time in my head. There’s a certain kind of loneliness that comes from living in a place where you know everyone, but where most people associate you with the worst day of their lives. READ MORE
DEPARTMENTS
Booked & Printed
by Laurel Flores Fantauzzo
Power struggles. Secrets kept. Divided destinies. Loyalties, longings, obligations, and betrayals. The epic rivalries and affections inherent between sisters are perhaps unlike any other relationship’s, beginning at birth and continuing even beyond death. When criminal elements intervene into sisters’ tensions and bonds, the love sisters bear for each other can grow into fearsome methods of protection, memory, and even vengeance. READ MORE
We give a prize of $25 to the person who invents the best mystery story (in 250 words or less, and be sure to include a crime) based on the photograph provided in each issue. The story will be printed in a future issue. READ THIS ISSUE’S WINNING STORY
Scrambled Women Tec I
by Mark Lagasse
Unscramble the letters of each numbered entry to spell the name of a famous sleuth. MOST RECENT PUZZLE