Review: Poor proofreading, only okay stories
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 22, 2012
Collection of "best" short stories of 2009: "Animal Rescue" by Dennis Lehane, "Family Affair: A Smokey Dalton Story by Kris Nelscott (aka Kristine Kathryn Rusch), "Survival Instincts" by Sandra Seamans, "Julius Katz" by Dave Zelserman, "Seeing the Moon" by S.J. Rozan, "Dark Chocolate" by Nancy Pickard, "Telegraphing" by Marcia Muller, "The Valhalla Verdict" by Doug Allyn, "Pure Pulp" by Bill Crider, "Blood Sacrifices and the Catatonic Kid" by Tom Piccirilli, "Patterns" by Richard Lupoff, "The Tell-Tale Purr" by Mary Higgins Clark, "The Big Switch: A Mike Hammer Story" by Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins, "Crazy Larry Smells Bacon" by Greg Bardsley, "Femme Sole" by Dana Cameron, "The Dark Island" by Brendan DuBois, "The Caretaker" by Terence Faherty, "The Case of Colonel Crockett's Violin" by Gillian Linscott, "The Case of Colonel Warburton's Madness" by Lyndsay Faye, "Time Will Tell" by Twist Phelan, "By Hook or By Crook" by Charlie Drees, "The Final Nail: A Val O'Farrell Story" by Bob Randisi, "Amapola" by Luis Alberto Urrea, "Cougar" by Laura Lippman, "Digby, Attorney at Law" by Jim Fusilli, "The Way They Limp" by Clark Howard, "O'Nelligan's Glory" by Michael Nethercott, "Between Sins" by Robert Levinson.Since there is no interactive Table of Contents, pretty much the only way you can read through this large volume is to just read through it. "Julius Katz" was an unusual PI story; he wasn't constantly getting beat up and he uses an SF-quality gadget. Many of the stories had a dark, cynical feel, not surprising in P.I. stories but it also showed up in stories like "Family Affair," "Femme Sole," and "Blood Sacrifices and the Catatonic Kid." I had to laugh at the basic premise of "Telegraphing" although it's not a humorous story at all. "Pure Pulp" offered no likable characters but a clever solution. There had to be a couple of Sherlock Holmes stories, of course. "The Case of Colonel Crockett's Violin" was pretty decent, while "The Case of Colonel Warburton's Madness" glaringly failed to reproduce Doyle's narrative style. "Dark Chocolate" is horror rather than a true mystery. The book overall leaned heavily to PI stories, which I generally don't like. There were a disappointingly large number of typos and word misuses, such as "here eyes" instead of "her eyes," "check" instead of "cheek," "site precedent" instead of "cite precedent;" they didn't affect the readability much, but I don't expect sloppiness from this team and it's a recent enough book that the ebook should have been produced from an editorial file, not OCRed. Combining okay but not great stories with such poor proofreading, the highest I can rate this book is 3.