Thriller + Mystery

It’s not like I was going to marry him; we were just shacking up. But I was surprised Benji had the kind of money where he could buy a house. The real estate agent, Ryan, couldn’t have been much older than us, but his loafers, his aftershave, and his hair comb made him seem downright […]

December 30, 2018 Dear Wade, You know Arnie’s Gas, Bait & Tackle? I’ve always wondered why he built it where he did, on that dusty strip by the community college, all the way across town from the lake. The first time I stopped there for gas—a decade ago, just out of college and moving to […]

I walked into our shack holding a dead seagull. I’d come all the way from the beach with hunger stabbing my stomach, clutching that bird in my fist and refusing to eat it because Amos needed it more. My younger brother’s dark head jerked up from where he was whittling at the kitchen-table. I grinned […]

The Girl Detective reads about her death on Twitter. She is surprised. She doesn’t remember much from the night before—a bar with Bess and George. A man. A drink. A struggle. A stumble home in the dark—but she is The Girl Detective. She can’t be dead. She has hamburgers already pattied for dinner tonight. She […]

On the first day of the Divine Feminine Kabbalah Power Retreat, it’s “hello my name is and I work in” with the other women executives over kefir and kombucha, everyone looking jetlagged and itchy in the natural fiber robes and vegan leather sandals we’d been handed at check-in. Hello, my name is Stephanie and I […]

There came an evening when, returning home from filling his lungs with rank seaside air, Abel Crane noticed a light in his living room window. The sight froze him. He had never seen a room of his house lit from outside before. Finally, he removed his spectacles and wiped their lenses on the quarters of […]

First exposure There’s a convertible in the scrap yard covered in “PSYCHOLOGY RULEZ” and “Radio Nil Midnight Sessions” stickers. The owner must have been a fan of Grant’s show. We settle across the leather backseat with a squeak as the tape starts its loop over again. The top is down, and the stars and heat […]

Dirt crawled under Zuzi’s fingernail as she traced another letter into the shack floor, her secret game. When the door swung open, she hastily smoothed away the evidence. It could put her and Mama in danger. She couldn’t say why, but she certainly felt it. A mass, tangled as her hair, stuck in her throat. […]

My younger half-sister fell thirty-seven feet from the Canyon River Bridge sometime between 11:30 PM and 1:30 AM on a Thursday in early January, and I, being the coroner’s assistant, would have watched her autopsy if Dr. Stevens hadn’t led me into the stale, frigid morning, under a monochrome sky with its heart ripped out. […]

Phyllis and Davina lived at the superior end of Almiston Green, furthest from the cricket pitch and the little houses that so cluttered the lower slopes.  Their homes were large, detached and sprawling, commanding chocolate-box views of the church, the war memorial and, across the green, the thatched Duke of Almiston public house.  So much […]

Game six of the 1982 World Series had been a damp affair, and the skies in St. Louis were opening again as the tarp came out for yet another rain delay. In his basement workshop, Kevin Watts grimaced but did not actually look up at the small TV in the corner as the announcers settled […]

I flick my tongue across each individual tooth to busy my mouth with something other than talk. I am rooted to the spot in the backyard―once my yard, now Kate’s―and also rooted to something else. The soft whisper of a time not so long ago, when Kate was younger and more vulnerable, and I stood […]