Next Issue

Who’s Asking?
by Linda Landrigan

One of the great pleasures of producing Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine is that we’re able to offer stories that feature a range of interesting protagonists. Sure, we love our cops and P.I.s, but in just this issue, we also have a PhD working as a janitor, a beach bum, a movie production designer, and a management consultant. Each brings their own history, skills, and expertise to the investigations they pursue.

T. Lawton holds down the police procedural spot in this issue with “Murder Alley,” set during Prohibition, while Matthew Wilson’s procedural takes us to postwar Germany in “A Widow’s Suitors.” Steve Liskow features a cop sidelined by injury who’s alerted to an investigation by his physical therapist in “I Ain’t Got No Home.” An aggrieved father with a gun in his pocket seeks vengeance in Bill Pronzini’s “The Back End of Nowhere,” while sibling kidnap victims turn the tables on their captors in Mat Coward’s humorous tale “Come Forth and Be Glad in the Sun.” A management consultant tasked with eliminating jobs at a Maine shipyard runs into more than just angry employees in Gabriela Stiteler’s dark tale “Quick Turnaround,” while an island beach bum and part-time pilot finds an abandoned mutt and wonders what became of its owner in “Beachdog” by Pete Barnstrom; we are delighted to introduce both authors to the pages of AHMM. A campus maintenance worker, formerly an academic in Latvia, pays the price for correcting the calculations of a star researcher in “Wheel of Fortune” by Bill Cameron. A high school math teacher who moonlights as a P.I. takes on a sensitive case at an exclusive college in “Admissions” by Ken Linn. A rural barn appeals to both a film production designer and a kid on the run from the cops in Douglas Grant Johnson’s “The Problem with the Perfect Location.” Just out of the hospital following his previous adventure (“The Man Who Went Down Under” July/August 2022) Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson’s young P.I. Dalton Duckworth finds himself in an involuntary partnership with his mother and her boyfriend in “Bent, Bent & Duckworth,” but Janice Law’s experienced P.I. misjudges his client and finds himself embroiled in an international intrigue in “The Man from Hong Kong.”

When you pick up an AHMM story, you may not know who the investigator’s going to be, but you can always count on a gripping tale.