Short Story News: Lyn Worthern

Cozy Villages of Death (cozy mystery)

Editor  Lyn Worthen

Secrets hide behind those peacefully shuttered windows... Rumors spread over garden hedges, and around knitting circles. Neighborhood cats discover a boneyard.And when Death strolls through the tranquil countryside or checks into the quaint village inn for the weekend, it's the intrepid - and often accidental - investigators who must find and decipher clues, unravel mysteries, and bring the killer to justice.

The inspiration for "Cozy Villages" came from two satirical articles that hit my newsfeed within a single twenty-four hour period. The first, entitled "Quaint English Village Fails to Meet its Mysterious Murder Quota for the Year," lamented the unprecedented lack of murders in a particular English village. The second, helpfully titled "Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village," provided travelers with helpful tips for surviving their vacation to these decidedly perilous destinations. With those two articles in mind, I couldn't *not* build an anthology around the theme.

Short Story News: Kathleen Marple Kalb

The Thanksgiving Ragamuffin (mystery)

Kathleen Marple Kalb

On Thanksgiving Day, 1899, opera star Ella Shane and her cousin Tommy Hurley help a poor newsboy who is wrongly accused of a crime because of anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic prejudice, and end up solving a second case as well.

The theme of this year’s NY/TriState Sisters in Crime anthology is social justice. In the Ella Shane books, nativist, religious, and class prejudice are key issues, so when I found out about the tradition of New York City’s “Thanksgiving Ragamuffins” begging for treats on the holiday, it was the perfect start for a short story.

 

  

Kathleen Marple Kalb also contributed this recent post about writing short stories during the pandemic.

Short Story News: Gay Toltl Kinman

Greenway: Four mystery short stories set on Greenway, Agatha Christie's holiday home in Devon 

Gay Toltl Kinman 

An American script writer with an American film crew work on a documentary of Agatha Christie's property--and then things go awry--but apropos for the setting. 

I visited the property and the house and there is no way i could not write a mystery story--or four--set there.

Short Story News: D.M. Barr

 

A Trial for the Books (crime/satire)

D.M. Barr

 

Amid its bustling, diverse fabric, injustice is unfortunately as much a part of the New York City landscape as Times Square, the Empire State Building, and the Statue of Liberty. Such inequities are spotlighted in, Justice for All: Murder New York Style 5, collection of sixteen short and thought-provoking stories penned by some of the Sisters in Crime New York/Tri-State chapter’s most prolific authors. The crime committed may involve homophobia, xenophobia, child abandonment, sexual abuse, white privilege, ageism, or literary snobbery. Regardless, these tales are designed to both enlighten and delight readers of suspense who seek out a bit of fairness and integrity in the city that may never sleep but does often rectify its wrongs.

 

I wrote the story after a blog tour host gave me a low rating because I had profanity in a book I never marketed as a clean read. 

Short Story News: Judy Penz Sheluk

Live Free or Tri: A Collection of Three Short Mystery Stories (mystery)

Death and Deception
Appearances are often deceiving and that is the underlying premise in this collection of short crime fiction:
In “Live Free or Die,” naive 21-year-old Emmy falls hard for 31-year-old Jack, an efficiency expert from New Hampshire who is not all that he seems. 
In “Murder in the Marsh,” cyclist Carrie Anne Camack discovers more than she bargained for in the fertile farmlands of Ontario’s Holland Marsh. 
In the final story, “The Cycopaths,” a triathlon team’s open-water swim training in Collingwood, Ontario, has deadly consequences. 

Why did you write this story? Each story in this collection is inspired by real-life events (without the murder, of course). I “was” Emmy with a “Jack” in my life, I cycled in the Holland Marsh while learning to use cllpless pedals, and I went to a triathlon swim camp where the competition was fierce.