Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine - May/June 2022

I dette nummeret

EQMM’s May/June 2022 issue celebrates Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and the spring season with signature mystery and mayhem. In “The Manglik Curse” by Smita Harish Jain, a daughter tries to bend her parents’ marriage traditions and her astrological fate to her will; in “Phoney Friend” by Peter Turnbull, a community must come to terms with the death of three unpopular sons and the legacy of their father; in “Lucky Stars” by Readers Award winner Karen Harrington, a father’s distance puts a daughter in danger from her temporary guardian.
The challenges of motherhood are at the forefront in Sheila Kohler’s poetic “A Secret Country,” “The Investigation,” by Adrienne Celt, and “The Bridge” by Twist Phelan. And fatherhood takes center stage in “The King’s Ferret,” a historical by David Dean.
Doug Allyn’s “Blind Baseball,” a quest story, brings in family, plus friends who are as tight as family; in “Pedro Antão’s Glasses,” a nephew speculates about his mysterious uncle’s final actions; characters in the Black Mask department’s “A Complicated History” by Daniel C. Bartlett navigate the complex tragedies of strained family relationships, and brotherly and spousal relations turn deadly in “A Philosophical Difference” by Joseph Goodrich and “The Thesaurus of Love and Death” by Sharyn Kolberg, respectively. More straightforward motives are revealed (by classical detection) in “The Artist Will Not Be Present,” a case for P.I. Martin Wade by Libby Cudmore, “The Doctor Who Fell Into Sin” by Anne van Doorn, and “Dead Man’s Gorge” by Michael Bracken, while some truly amateur sleuths uncover a hornet’s nest in “I Believe in You” by Jeremiah K. Balko (Department of First Stories).
You’ll be outdoors this spring too, but that proves hazardous for characters in “Blue Sky” by Andrew Bourelle, “The Natural Order of Things” by Sylvia Maultash Warsh, and “Runner” by Tyler Fiecke (Department of First Stories).