Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine - July 2014

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Bill Pronzini’s series detectives Carpenter and Quincannon kick off the July issue by posing the challenging question “It Couldn’t Be Done?” and it’s a fitting one, for they aren’t the only ones in these pages facing seemingly impossible or even surreal circumstances. Investigators Hennessey and Yellich, in Peter Turnbull’s story “Pancras Sullivan,” take on a case of mysterious death and must decide if a string of eerily related details are coincidences or clues. Meanwhile, crime historian and amateur sleuth Lizzie Stewart sets off to track down the donor of an anonymous gift to the Institute for the Study of Southern Crime and Culture, with only threads—literally!—to go on (“In Her Fashion” by Frankie Y. Bailey).

The act of survival is an ostensibly hopeless feat when the scientist-heroine of Carlos Orsi’s adventurous and dark Passport story “Best Eaten Cold” finds herself flung by chagrined lovers into the Antarctic Ocean; she must plot her revenge amidst an icy, otherworldly landscape—but only after escaping the elements. Violence and anger threaten too in the hostile backwoods of “Night Belongs to the Animals” by Meredith Frazier, in the face of sexual rivalry in “Splitting Adams” by Percy Spurlark Parker, and with a friend’s disappearance in Penny Hancock’s “Her Best Friend’s Boyfriend.”

While the crimes in this issue are hard to solve, they’re also difficult for the characters to understand in several tales in which reality unravels, such as Richard Helms’s story “Second Sight Unseen,” which introduces the skeptic Detective Amboy Boatright and celebrity psychic Bowie Crapster. Alex Grecian’s “Unknown Caller” will confront you, along with the protagonist, with a bizarre but deadly ultimatum. Most haunting is the tense, preternatural-tinged tale by Jenny Milchman, “The Very Old Man.” This issue is a page-turner…don’t miss it!