Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine - July/August 2024

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The July/August 2024 issue of EQMM ushers in sun-drenched celebrations with Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier’s “Murder Can’t Stop De Carnival,” set in the Virgin Islands and featuring several generations of carnival royalty in a motorcade turned treacherous, before moving on to stories where the road becomes even more dangerous: see “Off-Ramps” (by Brendan DuBois) and “Nate’s Initiation” (W. Edward Blain). The plot doesn’t take a smooth path for a young couple in “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Sharyn Kolberg either, or for a grandson mining the mysteries of his family’s activist past in “Redbeard” by Matthew Wilson, set amidst COVID and protests in the Pacific Northwest.
Speaking of family, mothers, fathers, and siblings all play a party in “Shall I Be Mother?” (another Beckett Marchland tale from David Dean), “Don’t Push Me” by Liza Cody (in which a veteran must exert constant vigilance to protect her mother), “Our Fathers’ Secrets” by Jeff Soloway (where two preteens get invested in the conflict between their dads), and “The Great Wolf” by John J. McKeon (evolving around a house with a dark family past).
Another haunting home is featured in Passport to Crime’s “The Tragedy of Black Swan Lodge” by Alice Arisugawa, the popular Japanese “New Traditionalist,” in which the eponymous detective Alice is clued in by reading Aesop’s fables to his old friend’s daughter. Two other tales, “An Ounce of Prevention” by Twist Phelan, where parents struggle with a sinister son, and “When Life Gives You Lemons,” in which a niece deals with her unlikeable uncle’s death, are also inspired by adages.
Two parents in “Letters From Tokyo” by Yoshinori Todo, a First story, deal with enigmatic correspondence—from their son, but something seems off. And the messages left by a missing tourist and social-media influencer in Mexico set off his mother’s insistence on answers in “El Aleman” by Hector Acosta.