Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine - July/August 2017

In this issue

There’s enough below the surface in EQMM’s July/August issue to keep you cool all summer. A new spy story by Jeffery Deaver, “Hard to Get,” takes readers to Eastern Europe where a new American agent encounters his attractive Russian counterpart. Later, crime has a literary link: Find what’s hidden in pages within our pages, as detective Kennedy in Paul Charles’s “Harry Potter and the Shadow of the Forger’s Throne” investigates the murder of a book collector, and Julius Katz that of a literary agent in Dave Zeltserman’s “Julius Katz and the Terminated Agent.” Then, a mystery author’s words may be mightier than the sword—or maybe not—in Graydon Miller’s “Poison Pen.” Ecclesiastical texts figure in Richard Stout’s Department of First Stories historical “Platina and the Green Children,” and Claudius Lyon invokes the Bible in “Peter and the Wolfe” by Loren D. Estleman.” Meanwhile, Dr. Twist in “The Yellow Book” by Paul Halter (Passport to Crime) unearths a text even more strange at the heart of a mystery seeming to involve the occult. And who is writing to whom in Louis Bayard’s suspenseful “Banana Triangle Six”? We’re on the road and in Hollywood past and present in the Department of First Stories’ “The Fast and the Furriest” by Pat H. Broeske, and continue the bumpy ride through the American desert, on the lam, in Susan Koefod’s “Tonic.” English farmland and family troubles feature in Judith Cutler’s “Learning to Drive,” and a picturesque French village in Christine Poulson’s “The Egyptian Cat.” Then, take a dive into the murky waters of Dennis McFadden’s “Galway Lake” and Marilyn Todd’s “Night Crossing.”