Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine - July/August 2020

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One of the attractions of crime fiction is the complexity of the plotlines. In addition to the narrative of the investigation, there is a parallel retelling of the crime, the story of the cover-up is also the story of its unveiling. In “Second Sight,” David Edgerley Gates explores how two officers, at two points in time, approach a case of a missing boy in New Mexico. In “The Amputation Pit,” Nancy Pauline Simpson’s early twentieth century sheriff and the nurse he is sweet on put their heads together to figure out how the remains of a young woman came to be in a pit of bones of amputated limbs dating back to the Civil War. A woman trying to understand her son’s suicide recreates his network in “The Substitute Dealer” by Jeff Soloway, while an art student confronts some uncomfortable truths in Elaine Menge’s “Plein Air.”
The landscape of a good mystery story can be as twisty as its plot. In a nod to Borges, Robert Lopresti places “The Library of Poisonville” in an underground bunker with beguiling contents. A fraternity pursues a solo hike on a winter’s night through the New Hampshire woods in Susan Oleksiw’s “The Pledge.” Competitive half brothers navigate their drug lord father’s business in R. T. Lawton’s “Reckoning with Your Host.” A defense advocate navigates a legal maze in “A Beastly Trial,” a historical which author Mark Thielman notes is based on actual practices of the time. A famous jockey pursues the truth in “Mystic Dream” by John F. Dobbyn
The streets of San Francisco in a near future offers an unusual setting for our thirteenth Black Orchid Novella Award-winning story, “The Red Taxi” by Ted Burge. The beautiful, volcanic landscape of Hawaii can be perilous to tourists in Albert Tucher’s “JDLR.” And Wayne J. Gardiner considers the particular challenges of interviewing for a job with the Mob in “Strickly Business.”