Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine - January/February 2019

In this issue

As has become traditional, EQMM’s January/February 2019 issue celebrates the winter holidays as well as Sherlock Holmes. We think you’ll find plenty of mischief here to get you through Christmas, the new year, and Holmes’s Twelfth Night birthday, starting with a new Amlingmeyer Brothers puzzler from Steve Hockensmith (“My Christmas Story”) that fits squarely into both of our themes and, immediately following, a tense Christmas Eve thriller from Iceland’s Ragnar Jónasson (“Don’t Panic”). What is Christmas like for someone unhappy at their job, or a semiloner invested in someone else’s holiday? Find out in the darkly humorous “Dead People’s Clothes” by Hollis Seamon and the moving “Wishing Tree” by Michael Bracken.

Of course, some of our offerings may make you feel more wary than bright—like O’Neil De Noux’s complicated postwar romance “The Pain” and A.J. Wright’s intense “Grace.” Not to worry: Your heart will beat fast enough to warm you through chilly reading about winter storms in the twisty “Snow Job” by Lia Matera and “The Father of the Corpse,” a Department of First Stories tale by Cecilia Fulton.

Crimes unfold from varying points of view in “Sideways Breakfast” by Brendan DuBois and “Entries and Exits” by Simon Brett . . . but where does the truth lie? We wonder about witnesses at the slippery “Shanty Falls” (by Doug Crandell) and through “Whiteout” (by G.M. Malliet) conditions at a series of ski lodges, and we get close—but not quite cozy—with narrators of different types in “Shall I Be Murder?” by Mat Coward and “Poof” by Batya Swift Yasgur.

While others revisit Holmes, someone in Passport to Crime has revised one of the most famous of all Christmas tales over and over (“Enough Is Enough” by Thomas Kastura) . . . and speaking of not being able to let things go, see Robert Lopresti’s short “Please Do Not Disturb.”