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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With the coming of autumn, readers may be finishing up their vacations, but our September/October issue shows that murder never takes a holiday. In Tuscany, Margaret Maron's former NYPD detective Sigrid Harald unofficially investigates the death of an art-loving tourist in "Murder at Montefugoni." Passport to Crime features a vacationing doctor whose literary knowledge solves the case of a Hollywood goddess's murdered lover in Paul Halter's "Nausicaa's Ball." And Edward D. Hoch takes us to a gambling-industry conference on "The Rock," a.k.a. Gibraltar, where a tricky case of stolen identities results in a reporter being killed for knowing too much.

The rest of the issue showcases some of our readers' all-time favorite authors. Joyce Carol Oates is back with "Split/Brain," about the confrontation between a suburban woman and her delinquent nephew. MWA Grand Master Bill Pronzini asks "What Happened to Mary?" in a small town where there is only one obvious suspect in a woman's murder—but more than one crime is being committed. CWA Diamond Dagger Winner Robert Barnard's latest cozy features a Norwegian amateur sleuth and his canine assistant who investigate "An Object of Scandal and Concern," and a wife's sleazy past plays a key role in "Proof of Love," the newest case for frequent contributor Mick Herron's P.I.s Zoë Boehm and Joe Silvermann. Fellow Brit Judith Cutler's 19th-century parson Tobias Campion stakes his reputation on a poor man's innocence—and the implied guilt of a wealthy family—in "The Parson and the Highwayman." And the ever-popular Loren D. Estleman continues his Claudius Lyon series with "The Boy Who Cried Wolfe," in which a boy asks the wannabe detective to find his missing father.

Other special treats of this jam-packed double issue include Simon Levack's latest Aztec mystery, in which Yaotl's warrior brother is involved in the disappearance of "The Girl From the Pleasure House." Jean Femling illustrates one danger of teenage drivers in "After Babygirl," while Twist Phelan's brief, comic "The Peahen" pays crime-fiction homage to newspaper columnist Pete Dexter. In Mike Wiecek's wry "Event Risk," a hit man plots to flush out his target by staging the death of the CEO who hired him. John C. Boland's Key West P.I., while she misses her late father, has her doubts about his ex-C.I.A. friends when the suspicious murders start in "Last Island South." New Zealander Stephen Ross supplies a creepy tale about the jingoism and xenophobia of "The Wickern Boys," in WWII Britain. Joseph Wallace uses his baseball history knowledge to spin a yarn about "Diamond Ruby," a girl pitcher with the guts to face down Babe Ruth in the 1930s minor leagues, and a writer decides to join the high-stakes pursuit of a hijacked hot-air balloon in Tom Piccirilli's "Between the Dark and the Daylight." Finally, a pair of storm stories remind us that the season is changing: A girl witnesses an awful murder in New Orleans, but worse is to come in Meenakshi Gigi Durham's "Storm Surge;" and the violence of Nature and of man are both at work on a New England beach in newcomer Amelia Symington's First Story, "An Ill Wind."

"Trouble in Mind" by John Harvey, "Manila Burning" by Clark Howard, "Candles on the Corner" by Janet Dawson, "When There's a Will"  by Judith Cutler, and more!