Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine - September/October 2023

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Ars Athletica
Heightened passions, intense competition, pride and prizes, the athletic arts inevitability offer a fair field for murder and crime, an opportunity that several stories in the current issue take full advantage of.
Mark Hannon captures the violent choreography of a boxing match in “Doing Business.” Dave Waskin describes the pressure endured by a star college basketball player in “The Last Shot.” Jim Fusilli explores the motivations that drive our fascination with baseball in “Gentlemen’s Agreement.” Also, a hiking trip in Hawaii turns into a dangerous and deadly tangle for the police to unravel in Albert Tucher’s “The English Major.” And online gaming proves as competitive as more physical sports, with all the heightened stakes and emotions, in Elizabeth Zelvin’s “Death Will Stream Your Game.”
Meanwhile, at a high school science fair, movie buff Sheriff Douglas meets his match in a precocious teen in John M. Floyd’s “The Pod Squad.” Mistrust of a new client sends New Orleans P.I. Lucien Caye deep into the world of art forgeries in “The Little Irène Escapade” by O’Neil De Noux. Intrepid Vegas-based stylist Stacey Deshay travels to New Orleans to comfort a friend, and hear the reading of a will, in “Bayou Blues” by Shauna Washington. A retired Ecuadoran Capitán Guillén steps up for an old colleague who is being blackmailed in “El Abuelo del Jugador” by Tom Larsen. And an investigator of a different sort ferrets out the fate of a dispersed litter of kittens in Jeff Somers’s tale “The Little Birds.”
After a hold-up, a quick-thinking waitress makes some key connections in “Smitty’s Roadside Diner” by Michael Bracken and Sandra Murphy. Mark Thielman interweaves the history of a dead town with a couple’s present predicament in “The Ties That Bind.”
We're delighted to offer readers a ringside view of the winners and losers, the heroes and the scamps; that's entertainment to cheer for.