Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine - January/February 2021

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Time to turn a new page! If 2020 was the year we thought would never end, 2021 arrives full of promise. Those of us leading a life of crime—that is, as writers and editors of crime fiction—resolve, too, to bring you ever more wicked, stylish, baffling tales to keep you reading—and out of trouble. Here are fifteen such spellbinding stories. When a book dealer dies in the filthy kitchen of his shop, surprises keep coming in John H. Dirckx’s procedural “Backwords.” Even court officer Foxx is surprised to learn what a few lawyers are up to in Kevin Egan’s “Hard Money.” Motives abound when a town bully is shot, but the poor P.I.’s worst client—her mother—has a motive of her own in “Accusing Agnes” by Marianne Wilski Strong. A 1950s comedian gets more than a big break in Michael Mallory’s “There’s Nothing Funny About Murder.” It’s a horror writer’s worst nightmare—an overeager film producer—in Tim Burke’s funny “Mr. Jolly Gets His Jollies.” No good deed goes unpunished for a reporter in the dystopian future in Larry Light’s tale “Fake News.” Meanwhile, Meredith Anthony’s suspense-reading heroine finds her true self in literature in “Reader, I Killed Him.” Across the pond, R. T. Lawton’s young pickpocket during the reign of France’s Sun King outwits a couple of thieves with the aid of a new friend in “A Helping Hand.” A shop of useful—and magical—tools entices a disgraced soldier in “Piper at the Back Door of Dawn” by Dan Crawford. A retired zookeeper has a special way of dealing with a bad neighbor in Stephen Ross’s “The Underneath.” Passion has limits in New Orleans-set “Ticking of the Big Clock” by O’Neil De Noux. Stagecoach Mary returns in Leslie Budewitz’s “Coming Clean.” Doris looks down her nose at new neighbors in Barb Goffman’s “A Family Matter.” A midnight commotion is difficult for a child to interpret in Rebecca Cantrell’s “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”