Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine - January/February 2022

Magazine Description

In this issue

I’m not a fan of surprise endings, yet I like to be surprised by a story. This isn’t a paradox if you compare a story's plot to an unfamiliar back road. The sights and sounds are novel, the twists and turns break up the sense of inevitability, anything can lurk just around each turn. In this issue, two brothers pass the time by challenging each other with movie trivia until they stop for gas in John M. Floyd’s “Mayhem at the Mini-Mart.” Wiki Coffin, Joan Druett’s 19th century sailor, is stranded by an earthquake and tidal wave that trigger a series of seemingly unrelated tragedies in “Stagger, Stagger.” P.I. Kasper tracks a wayward wife in “Sugar and Spice,” by Elliot F. Sweeney. Ecuadoran Police Captain Guillén may be a bull in a china shop, but he’s the preferred detective for a sensitive case in “Pobre Maria” by Tom Larsen. In Parker Littlewood’s latest, fast-talking Wiley and his horse Buck have an unpleasant encounter in “Buck and Wiley Tangle with Rustlers.” New to our pages, J. R. Parsons offers a tale of murder on the rodeo circuit in “Bama Carter Gets Rode.” An abusive boyfriend and two parrots make for an explosive mix in Roger Johns’s “Birdbrains.” Cassandra Chan returns to AHMM after a long hiatus with a historical whodunit set on tony Long Island in “A Murder in Oyster Bay.” Seasonal stories bookmark our issue: “HazMat Holiday” by Catherine Dilts and “Do Not Open Till Christmas” by Steve Hockensmith. A popular author returns to his family vacation home and confronts his past in Charles John Harper’s “Backstory.” A reckoning arrives in the night in Michael Nethercott’s “All Our Crimes.” A glimpse of the future in the midst of a pandemic doesn’t help in Dave Zeltserman’s “Uncle Woody’s Thingmajig.” The end of the year reminds us that our own future is also an unknown path. A path we hope is shared with family and friends—old and new—that leads to good health and new and interesting possibilities. Here’s to a Happy New Year to all our readers and writers.