Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: With Love, Marjorie Ann by Marcia Talley

 

Marcia Talley has written 20 books about cancer survivor Hannah Ives. The first book, Sing It to Her Bones (Dell, 1999), won the Malice Domestic grant for Best Unpublished Novel. The second book, Unbreathed Memories (Dell, 2000), won the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Contemporary Mystery. The third, Occasion of Revenge (Dell, 2001), was a Top Ten Pick by Poisoned Pen Bookstore.

While turning out book after book Talley also served as the national president of Sisters in Crime in 2009-2010 and served on the national board of Mystery Writers of America. She also found time to write two serial novels and short stories for many anthologies. With Love, Marjorie Ann (2025) is a collection of 18 short stories by Talley published between 1999 and 2024 into a single volume. They include Agatha award winners (Too Many Cooks, Driven to Distraction) and Agatha and Anthony award nominees. The anthology was compiled, edited, and published by Crippen & Landru (C&L) in time for the 2025 Malice Domestic Conference, at which Talley is Guest of Honor.

In addition to the title story, the much-married Marjorie Ann appears in three more short stories in the volume. There’s a homeowner who would rather renovate his house than sell it, a grandfather who foils a murder with a malfunctioning baby monitor, a rewrite of the ending of a Dickens novel, and a critically injured older woman who manages to identify her attacker. My favorite is the retelling of the Scottish play from the perspective of the witches.

C&L offers a unique and valuable service in that it produces single-author short story collections, both by contemporary crime fiction authors and by mystery writers of the past. While many authors publish short fiction in periodicals, they now also contribute to anthologies of all kinds. These anthologies are seldom indexed in any meaningful way and a compilation of this sort protects short stories that might otherwise be considered lost. C&L preserves these stories for generations to come and for readers interested in an author’s entire output.

 

·         Publisher: ‎Crippen & Landru Publishers (March 18, 2025)

·         Language: ‎English

·         Paperback: ‎198 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎1932009795

·         ISBN-13: ‎978-1932009798

 
 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/3YEI7e6

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2025

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.