#874 The Ring of Kerry- Dennis McFadden

#874 The Ring of Kerry- Dennis McFadden

Lafferty was working a long con of a seemingly shy and gullible woman named Eena. She was running from her violent ex-boyfriend was now in prison, or so she said. He knew the girl had known the whereabouts of her grandmother’s old ring. Her family finally convinced her to allow him to dig up her grave to get it. But what about his wife? He had to shed himself of his old entanglements.

“Betrayal was not his currency, but there were degrees of betrayal, and accommodations could often be reached, given the right rationale.”

While digging up the grave he learned that there was a decoy ring, and we find out both sides are playing each other. When a third party gets into the act, things get messy. Don’t they always?

Notable Passage: “He was accustomed to cheap rooms, some of the happiest moments of his life had been squandered in cheap rooms, and he could only hope this would prove to be another.”

Rating: 7-6-6-7 Total= 26

#785 Remora, IL- Kevin Leahy

#785 Remora, IL- Kevin Leahy

The factory town of Remora, Illinois was on the brink of collapse. The car plant shut down and unemployment was skyrocketing. They turned to the only opportunity they saw, the private prison industry. It guaranteed construction jobs, guard jobs and a steady stream of visitors to fill shops, hotels, and restaurants. They accepted the change before knowing exactly what it would mean. At first they were relieved.

“Those first paychecks were intoxicating. We’d forgotten the feeling of having money, and were starving for it.”

As the prison opened, they got a sense of life as a prison town. New people, a caste system of society and although good paying jobs, they were jobs that changed the nature of a person. Rather than instilling pride they created anxiety and violence. And they also had to acknowledge the inmates themselves, most people don’t ever have to really think about what a prison was.

“To the extent that we thought about the men in those buses, we imagined them as one type, multiplied: sullen, dangerous, and deserving of punishment, but potentially redeemable, through faith and good works.”

And then there was the face-to-face encounter with the racism made apparent by locking up a large percentage of non-white Americans. Racism in the system, in the country, in themselves.

“It was true that among many of us, a mental short-hand had developed: if we saw white strangers, we assumed they were police or lawyers…If they weren’t white, we assumed they were visiting an incarcerated friend or family member.”

This story appears in the 2013 Best American Mystery Stories. I don’t find any mystery in this story. If you told me this was non-fiction I wouldn’t have a hard time believing it. This is a great, sobering view of just one of the thousands of effects the over-inflated prison industry has on this country.

Rating: 9-8-9-9 Total= 35

#694 Crossing- Andre Kocsis

#694 Crossing- Andre Kocsis

James was a war resister and a world class mountain climber. He got himself into some trouble, moved to Canada and now lives off the grid. Thirty-seven years later, he’s a mountain guide going by the name Sierra. He lives in a glorified lean-to in the Alpine and makes money helping skiers and hikers get through the peaks. Occasionally he makes some extra cash guiding pot dealers from British Columbia across the Montana Border.

When he is offered twice his rate to take some foreigners across, he thinks it’s just more dope. But these Russian speaking smugglers are carrying something much more dangerous than drugs. People die, things get lost, and Sierra needs to rely on his experience to survive.

It’s a good backwoods adventure story. The infusion of politics is a bit sloppy and probably unnecessary. I didn’t find it helpful to any part of the story, except why he lived in the mountains.

Notable Passage: “The U.S. is at war again. It took just one generation to forget the lessons of Viet Nam."

Rating: 8-8-7-7 Total= 30

#659 The Street Ends at the Cemetery- Clark Howard

#659 The Street Ends at the Cemetery- Clark Howard

This is another excellent selection from the 2013 Best American Mystery Stories collection. $1.2 million was taken from a Modesto bank. The robber was caught with the stolen getaway car but the money was not recovered. Now In jail there is a plan to find out where it is. Here are the characters:

-Cory- A low level prison guard that befriends the thief’s girlfriend and accomplice. 

-Billie-Sue- The girlfriend, waiting patiently for Lester’s release.

-Lester- The thief himself still in prison.

-Hardesty- A former FBI agent still claiming his credentials.

-Duffy- A nervous prison warden who thinks Hardesty is for real.

Who ends up with the money? We have a sting operation, a planned prison break, quickly shifting allegiances, and a few hastily procured weapons—all sorts of fun!

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30

#624 The Devil to Pay- David Edgerley Gates

#624 The Devil to Pay- David Edgerley Gates

This is a top-notch mystery story. The difference between a mystery and most of the other short stories I read, in this case I don’t want to give away any of the plot details. Mysteries don’t really have much value once you know what happens. That said, this tracks down a million dollar gun heist, following a common street criminal, the NYPD, the FBI, the NSA, Mexican drug cartels and the Russian mob. What’s not to like?

Rating: 7-7-8-6 Total= 28 

#596 The Sailor in the Picture- Eileen Dreyer

#596 The Sailor in the Picture- Eileen Dreyer

It’s one of the most famous pictures ever take. A sailor kissing a nurse he just met in times square on the day Japan surrenders, marking the end of WWII. Alfred Eisenstaedt was following the sailor as he jubilantly made his way through the crowd kissing any woman he could. What about the other woman, the other pictures? A picture if the sailor kissing Peg hangs in her living room. It happened just before the famous kiss and wasn’t captured as elegantly, but it was the most important day of her life.

Her husband, Jimmy was about to get home. She got the telegram a week earlier and was getting prepared to have a husband again. She had survived by herself, a single mother with twins, working at a butcher shop. She was the fastest woman with a knife. Now everyone was congratulating her because she could now go back to being “just a wife and a mother.” 

There was something ominous about Jimmy’s return, something more than Peg losing her job and her independence. We see what it is after Jimmy witnesses the sailor kissing his wife in Time’s Square. Good thing she learned how to use the knife.

Rating: 7-8-8-8 Total= 31

#548 Charm City- Robert Stone

#548 Charm City- Robert Stone

Frank Bower falls for a con. He is attending a music recital alone at the museum, and lets himself be seduced by a mysterious woman. He is married but likes the taste of a little adventure and drives her across the bay to his second house. All the while, the woman remains vague and intriguing. When they get to the house, she feigns remorse and asks to be driven home.

We see later that the meeting was not a random occurrence, but a set up, and she had successfully used his vanity to scope out his house for a robbery.

Notable Passage: “Everybody loves you when you’re somebody else.”

Rating: 7-6-6-6 Total= 25

#547 Misprision of Felony- O’Neil De Noux

#547 Misprision of Felony- O’Neil De Noux

A murder happens in New Orleans. The owner of a corner store was shot and killed in an armed robbery. Unfortunately this has happened more now than it used to.

“Things were different now, AK—after Katrina. The hardcore criminals, who were some of the first to return, had reestablished themselves with a killing vengeance. The murder rate was back up top as new blood carved out drug territories, and the police department, as devastated as the neighborhoods, reeled in turmoil.”

Det. Savary is on the case, but is getting nowhere. He is being stonewalled by the neighborhood, meaning only one thing:

“A local boy did this, but no one was giving him up to the police. It didn’t even matter if Savary was raised three blocks away on Erato Street. The day he started the police academy was the day he’d left the neighborhood—permanently.”

With the help of his FBI friend, Savary tracks down the murderer, and it was a local criminal. Now that the murder is taken care of, he’s going after the culture of silence. Misprision of Felony goes back to English common law. It makes it illegal to knowingly conceal the details of a felony, even if you, yourself are not involved. In other words, rat or rot.

Rating: 7-6-6-5 Total= 24

#508 A Fine Mist of Blood- Michael Connelly

#508 A Fine Mist of Blood- Michael Connelly

Connely uses his Detective Harry Bosch for this one, the same detective used in many of his mystery novels. This time he’s working a cold case, actually two cold cases. The LAPD has put together a DEATH squad that has digitized all the forensic details of their unsolved cases. Harry gets a hit that links two muders.

Diane Gables was a cursory witness in two old cases, but nothing much came out of either one. When Harry catches her in a seemingly innocent lie, he knows immediately that she was the killer. She falls in his web and it turns out that she is a vigilante targeting abusive men.

This story discusses the fine line between punishment and retribution, revenge versus justice.

Rating: 7-6-7-6 Total= 26

#503 Click-Clack the Rattlebag- Neil Gaiman

#503 Click-Clack the Rattlebag- Neil Gaiman

This is a short, well-developed horror story. A child is at home in his family’s large, dark, dusty house. He is being watched by his sister’s new boyfriend. He wants to hear a story before he goes to bed, and asks for a story about Click-Clacks:

-Click-Clacks, said the boy, are the best monsters ever.

-Are they from Television?

-I don’t think so. I don’t thing any people know where they come from. Mostly they come from the dark.

-Good place for a monster to come from.

-Yes.

So the boy and the boyfriend watching him walk down the hallway to the boy’s bedroom while they talk about what makes a good Click-Clack horror story. “Click-Clacks are much scarier than vampires.” “They’re made of dark. And they come in when you don’t pay attention…and they look like what you’re not expecting.”

While they discuss the anatomy of a good horror story, it turns into a horror story. Click-Clack!

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31

#491 An Intrusion- Tim Wirkus

#491 An Intrusion- Tim Wirkus

This was in the 2013 Best American Non-Required Reading under the subheading: Best American Advertisement for a Home Security System. Mike and Julie are a happy young couple managing but barely to eke out their mortgage payments. They come home one day to find an envelope of pictures tacked to a wall inside their home. They didn’t do it themselves, and nobody else has keys:

“The pictures showed a young couple engaged in a series of mundane domestic pursuits—standing together at a sing washing dishes, reading on a couch, playing cards at a dining room table, changing a light bulb in a floor lamp. The problem was that the couple—who were not Mike and Julia—were doing all these things inside Mike and Julie’s house.”

Creeeeeeepy! Makes me think of a Davis Lynch movie. They change locks, call the police, but the pictures keep coming until they move out and eventually break up. Some couple just cant handle the little mysteries of life.

Rating: 7-8-8-7 Total=30