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P.I.s and robbers and cops, oh my! These characters and more pack the pages of our September/October double issue. In Dave Zeltserman's "Archie's Been Framed," a new case for P.I. Julius Katz and his loyal assistant, Archie, the tiny supercomputer is the number-one suspect when his Internet girlfriend is murdered; and in Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "Mr. Alibi," an L.A. P.I. knows that trouble has found her when a stranger at a bar asks, "Will you be my alibi?" Bill Pronzini, Ronald Levitsky, and Mary Jane Maffini offer three types of thieves: the confident — though less clever than he thinks — bank robber (Pronzini, "The Last Laugh"); the down-on-their-luck schemers whose new friend with a double life helps them plan a holdup (Levitsky, "Leon and Squeak"); and the con artists who befriend a lonely woman — after previously fleecing her friends (Maffini, "So Much in Common"). And for two views of the policeman's lot, we have the light "Tontine," the latest Hennessey and Yellich yarn from Peter Turnbull, in which someone is offing the partners in an investment scheme, hoping to reap all the rewards for himself, and the chilly winter story "Administrative Leave," by Audrey Webb (Department of First Stories), which explores the long days after an officer's split-second decision in the line of duty.
The other suspense-packed half of our double issue includes some of our most popular authors. Doug Allyn moves south, and back in time, from his usual Michigan territory, with "The Scent of Lilacs" (excerpted below) set on the homefront turned battleground in 1865 Missouri. Marilyn Todd also returns to historical territory with "Open and Shut Case," in which her magician, The Great Rivorsky, is accused of murdering his wife in their locked caravan. Robert Barnard's tale of a quarreling married couple shows that sometimes opposites attract, but sometimes they're just "Incompatibles." David Braly makes his EQMM debut with "Tangle Beach" (excerpted below) in which an unsolved missing persons case is reopened when a boy literally stumbles across a wrecked boat and its skeletal crew. For something chillingly offbeat, we've got Marc R. Soto's Passport to Crime story, "The Divergent Man," about a husband whose dream-like "divergences" make it impossible for him to distinguish between past and present, reality and dreams. Brendan DuBois's "To Kill an Ump," about a man who returns to his hometown after decades away to settle a grudge from the baseball diamond, nicely coincides with the fall lead-up to the World Series. And finally, Joyce Carol Oates returns after a too-long absence, with a story for our Black Mask department entitled "Beersheba," in which a man's forgotten past has come back to remind him that nothing one does really stays behind . . . !
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