Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine - January/February 2020

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With the New Year we anticipate renewal and new beginnings, so perhaps you’ve noticed we’ve refreshed our masthead, for which we thank our top-notch design team. What hasn’t changed is the quality of the crime fiction you’ll find in our pages. Along with your favorite authors, we ring in the New Year with four authors new to our pages: Teresa Dovalpage (“The Sandalwood Killer”), Olivia Dunnett (The Witness”), Paul Grigg (“ Mossad Rules”), and Art Taylor (“The Boy Detective and the Summer of ’74”).

As the year ends in a string of holidays, we have a few stories to set the mood. A closing toy store is the setting for Steve Hockensmith’s holiday tale “The Last Noel”. At Christmastime, good deeds goes awry in Mark Thielman’s “The Wreck of the Edward Fitzsimmons.” And something is all wrong about a mystery writer’s double suicide in Sharon Hunt’s “Silent Night.”

As a judge and his law clerk transition from the old Tweed courthouse to the new Centre Street building in lower Manhattan in the 1920s, their relationship changes in unexpected ways in Kevin Egan’s “The Tombs Angel.” New York City is also the setting for Joseph D’Agnese’s tale featuring a mysterious radio at housewares shop in “The Detective Who Stopped by Bedford Street.”

Farther afield, Las Vegas stylist Stacey Deshay finds herself cooped up with a bunch of B-list actors when she stumbles over a body on the set of a reality show in “Alternate Reality.” A small town police chief deals with the aftermath of his first fatal shooting in Wayne J. Gardiner’s “Mistaken Identity.” And Dr. Watson gets pulled into a mystery with international intrigue while vacation in France in “On the Banks of the Styx” by James Tipton.

In this issue, you’ll also find a delightful mystery classic by Lillian de la Torre, “The Stroke of Thirteen,” featuring the eighteenth century writer and lexicographer Dr. Johnson, brought to our attention by Michael Mallory.