Assembled by best-selling suspense author Nelson DeMille, The Best American Mystery Stories 2004 contains a spectacular array of stories by mystery veterans and talented newcomers. Follow a chain reaction that saves a woman’s life, visit a house haunted by a husband’s violent killing spree, enter the high-stakes world of Las Vegas gambling, watch the line between reality and dream blur, travel with a bored salesman driven to crime, and much more. Encompassing all aspects of the genre, this year’s selections are sure to quicken pulses, send chills down the spine, and keep readers continually guessing.

A cut-and-dried case for a wily crime-scene reconstructionist is turned on its head in Michael Connelly’s “Mulholland Dive.” A terrible secret shared between two childhood friends resurfaces decades later as one of them lies on her deathbed in Alice Munro’s masterful “Child’s Play.” James Lee Burke tells the haunting tale of a Hurricane Katrina evacuee who unexpectedly finds comfort from an unimaginable loss in “Mist.” And in Holly Goddard Jones’s “Proof of God,” a young man’s car is repeatedly vandalized as proof that someone knows about the truths he’d never willingly reveal.

As Pelecanos notes in his introduction, the twenty “original and unique voices” in this collection pay homage to the genre’s forebears by taking crime fiction into a thrilling new direction. “But make no mistake,” he says, “we are all standing on the shoulders of writers who came before us and left an indelible mark on literature through craftsmanship, care, and the desire to leave something of worth behind.”

“Some people might tell you that crime short stories, unlike the more precious kind, are a kind of fictional ghetto, full of cardboard characters and clichéd situations. Not true. These stories are remarkably free of bullshit — although there’s always a little, just to grease the wheels,” writes guest editor John Sandford in his introduction. From an isolated Wyoming ranch to the Detroit boxing underworld, and from kidnapping and adultery in the Hollywood Hills to a serial killer loose in a nursing home, The Best American Mystery Stories 2017 hosts an entertaining abundance of crime, psychological suspense, and bad intentions.