SMFS Members Published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine: July/August 2020

Several SMFS list members are published in the Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine: July/ August  2020 issue. The issue is available from Dell Magazines as well as at Amazon and other vendors. The SMFS list members published in this issue are:

R. T. Lawton with “Reckoning with  Your Host.”

Robert Lopresti with the cover story, “The Library of Poisonville.”

Susan Oleksiw with “The Pledge.”

Publisher Synopsis:

Crime on Parallel Planes

One of the attractions of crime fiction is the complexity of the plotlines. In addition to the narrative of the investigation, there is a parallel retelling of the crime, the story of the cover-up is also the story of its unveiling. A tale told from multiple perspectives, each informed by history and personal experience and emotion, can turn in surprising ways. In “Second Sight,” David Edgerley Gates explores how two officers, at two points in time, approach a case of a missing boy in New Mexico. In “The Amputation Pit,” Nancy Pauline Simpson’s early twentieth century Sheriff Stickley and the nurse he is sweet on, Miss Polk, put their heads together to figure out how the remains of a young woman came to be in a pit of bones of amputated limbs dating back to the Civil War. A woman trying to understand her son’s suicide recreates his social network in “The Substitute Dealer” by Jeff Soloway, while an art student confronts some uncomfortable truths when he stalks his teacher in Elaine Menge’s “Plein Air.”

The landscape of a good mystery story can be as twisty as its plot. In a nod to Borges, Robert Lopresti places “The Library of Poisonville” in an underground bunker with beguiling contents. A fraternity pursues a solo hike on a winter’s night through the New Hampshire woods in Susan Oleksiw’s “The Pledge.” Competitive half brothers navigate their drug lord father’s business in R. T. Lawton’s sixth Shan Army story, “Reckoning with Your Host.” A young defense advocate navigates a legal maze in “A Beastly Trial,” a historical which author Mark Thielman notes is very much based on actual practices of the time. A famous jockey pursues the truth behind a losing horse in “Mystic Dream” by John F. Dobbyn

The streets of San Francisco in a near distant future offers an unusual setting for our thirteenth Black Orchid Novella Award-winning story, “The Red Taxi” by Ted Burge. The beautiful, volcanic landscape of Hawaii can be perilous to tourists in Albert Tucher’s “JDLR.” And Wayne J. Gardiner considers the particular challenges of interviewing for a job with the Mob in “Strickly Business.”

In crime fiction, there are always two or more versions to a story, making for twice the pleasure (or more!) from each of this issue's tales.