A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime

Angela Zeman's story is correctly entitled, "Green Heat." Nelson DeMille selected this story for Otto Penzler's 2004 collection, BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES (Haughton Mifflin).

If you are a lover of well-written short stories, you will definitely enjoy A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime. If you are a lover of mysteries and thrillers, you will also enjoy this collection and you may find yourself exposed for the first time to literary-quality fiction. This is a group of such superbly crafted short stories that it should be included as required reading for a short story writing workshop. I happen to love mysteries, but both as a writer of short stories and one who has studied enough literary fiction to be a bit of a critic and a compulsive editor, I find that my tastes are sometimes too particular to enjoy some of the more popular authors. And I have been disappointed on many occasions to discover that many best-selling authors of all genres will publish a wonderful first novel, get famous, get sloppy on editing, and it's all downhill from there. I won't name them here, but many of them I just can no longer bear to read because the prose is horridly written or the characters lack any degree of depth with which to hold my interest. This collection has sent me happily off looking for works by the authors. The tales flow quickly, but I'm spending time re-reading delectible, succinct passages and wonderful turns of phrase. The stories are full of rich, complex characters and lush atmospheric details. Mr. Deaver has edited a collection that makes for super reading for both the literary reader and the mystery genre reader!

one of the best in the mystery genre. Jeffrey Deaver starts it off with "Ninety-eight Point Six" a twisted, gnarly story of life at its' grittiest and greediest. It was my favorite; and those that followed tried to keep up and were 95% successful. For me it was a one day read that was impossible to put down and was tinglingly enjoyable. If you love mystery, variety and diversion, you will love this anthology. A neat Christmas gift for anyone who loves to read and loves to try to guess just what the twist will be.

The twenty contributions that make up this collection for the most part live up to the title as each tale occurs on a hot and sultry night. The stories run the gamut of crime fiction with a few seemingly more thriller than mystery. The contributors make up some of the top talent in the genre. It is this not surprising that all the tales is solid and entertaining though a few are superb. A HOT AND SULTRY NIGHT is aimed at the genre generalist as it crosses a diverse series of lines. Anyone who prefers a particular sub-genre will most likely find at least a story or two in the anthology, but must decide the economic value.Harriet Klausner