I was feeling slumpy recently and what got me out of it was reading some mystery short story collections. Which can be difficult enough things to find so I thought it would be worth sharing some short reviews of them.
Catherine Aird – Injury Time – Free on KU. Aird is someone I have mixed feelings for, she wrote classic British detective stories in 70's-90's and she was very good at it. If you like Christie, you will probably like Aird. And 90% of the time I do enjoy her books but then she will say something that makes you think she probably voted for Thatcher. In this collection the story which gave me the ick was Memory Corner. Which left me very ambivalent about liking the rest of the stories. So I decided to look up more recent mystery short stories collections.
Kate Atkinson – Normal Rules do not Apply. – This is very well titled, because Atkinson used these short stories to purge her mind of weird little ideas. A little mystery, a little spec fic, very weird. I would say that it is a little uneven but Atkinson is such a good writer that it is easy to keep going and there absolutely are gems in there. And I was really enjoying that these were modern stories so I went searching out more.
The Perfect Crime – Around the World in 22 Murders – ed Vaseem Khan and Maxim Jakubowski. I enjoyed this a lot, solid genre stories with good writing which is exactly what I was looking for. Some writers I am very familiar with and a huge fan of, others were new to me but I will definately be seeking out their novels. I would highly recommend.
by Indifferent_Jackdaw