Here, you will find highlights of each month's print issue – including excerpts from our award-winning short stories, our book-review column The Jury Box, and The Mystery Crossword.The place to be for a good mystery!
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Our March/April issue reveals human nature at its worst, and at its best. An unexpected vigilante is killing town miscreants in broad daylight in "Cleaning Up," Steven Steinbock's Department of First Stories debut; a P.I. trails a girl in a painting from her loving, trailer park home to the drug-laden art scene of the Big Apple in Robert S. Levinson's "The Girl in the Golden Gown"; and a romantic one-night stand is as dark and ugly the next day as it was uplifting the night before (see Passport to Crime's "Monopoly," by Judith Merchant). Good Samaritans also make an appearance: a small village's minister looks out for his flock (in his own unique way) in Val McDermid's "The Ministry of Whisky"; a freshly retired church tour guide, sensing something amiss one night, returns to the site and walks into danger in Christine Poulson's "A Tour of the Tower"; and a novelist goes after the bad guy when his neighbor's child is snatched from her driveway in Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "The Disappearance of Wicked."

Elsewhere, we find that believing the past is behind is sometimes foolish. A man returns to his hometown after decades away, to confront the lurking shadows of his childhood, in Edward D. Hoch's "The Faceless Thing"; amateur sleuth Owen Keane follows a clue found in discarded possessions to uncover a dead man's secret life during World Ward II, in Terence Faherty's "The Seven Sorrows"; a Michigan construction crew unexpectedly discovers a new angle to a 1969 breakout while converting an old city jail into a shopping center in Doug Allyn's "Days of Rage"; ransom money from a past kidnapping that supposedly ended in murder gets traced in Bruce Rubenstein's Black Mask entry "The Widow's Garden Party"; and a pair of estate-sale hunters think they've found something invaluable in an old trunk when suspicious characters start stalking them in Brian Muir's "On the Banks of the Khorad Dur."

Filling out the issue are several tales that demonstrate that best-laid plans are sometimes the most flawed: "Satan Rides the 5:15" by Vincent Lardo, in which two actors conspire against their director; "It All Adds Up" by Thomas Kaufman, about a con man who's running a lucrative life-coaching scam; "When, He Wondered" by Lynne Barrett, in which a Florida real-estate developer tries to fake his own death; "Death by Misadventure" by John Buchanan, in which a wife's careful infidelity is discovered by chance; and "Rearview Mirror" by Art Taylor, in which a road trip through the Southwest tests a young couple's resolve to quit the criminal life.

Edward D. Hoch, Val McDermid, Doug Allyn, Kristine Kathryn Rusch and more…