Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine - January/February 2024

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For all the thrill of the winter holidays, there can also be an undercurrent of dread: Overbooked flights, obnoxious relatives, the scrum in the department store for this year’s must-have toy, the depredations of porch thieves. Even the carols can reinforce this sense of unease: Santa spying on children to produce “naughty” and “nice” lists; the snotty reindeer who shun poor Rudolph. Well, in the midst of this season of dread and joy, we offer a respite—a little murder and mayhem to take your mind off your troubles. In the spirit of the season, we offer two stories that play with holiday expectations: “He Knows When You’ve Been Bad” by Leigh Grossman and John Gregory Betancourt, and “Mall Cop Christmas Parade” by Joslyn Chase. Another pairing features tales that explore the performative aspect of murder. A P.I. adrift in post-war New York finds his first case on Broadway when an actress is shot on stage in “An Opening for Murder” by Joseph Goodrich. And an unsavory reality television show seeks to recruit an out-of-work casting director in “Who Wants to Kill Someone?” by Michael Mallory. In other stories, the sweet deal that photographer Rick Peters enjoys for his studio space goes sour when his barber landlord is murdered in “Off the Top” by Floyd Sullivan. Mystery writer Shanks and his wife Cora attend a writers’ retreat where a manuscript has been filched in “Shanks in Retreat” by Robert Lopresti. A foreign aid worker in Africa comes under suspicion when his local assistant is murdered in “A Death in the Swamp” by Nick Spencer. A literature professor finds inspiration—for murder—in the poetry of Milton in “The Devil Is in the Details” by Mark Thielman. And a retiring police detective revisits his childhood neighborhood when an obnoxious academic is murdered in Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s novella “Arboretum Heights.”