For the past few years, The Mysterious Bookshop has published a collection of the best short stories to appear in various magazines and anthologies with the help of a guest editor. John Grisham is the editor selected and doing the selecting for 2025. The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2025 contains twenty tales along with a bonus story written in 1905.
I am not going to critique all of these stories, but I will basically encourage other readers to look into these collections. Grisham, as expected, does a good job of presenting this collection. The series editor and owner of the Mysterious Bookshop is Otto Penzler, who also publishes these collections.
The stories vary a bit in quality, but most of them are quite good. I enjoy the exposure to authors who are not well-known but quite talented.
This collection does give me some evidence that there are writers out there with some talent and love of the craft of storytelling. My thanks for Otto Penzler for this series.
Next up, I return to the exploits of Cameron Winter, created by Andrew Klavan, with the latest novel, After That, the Dark.
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