Snakeberry

Readers root for a criminal in fiction (or in real life) for many reasons. Perhaps the criminal is fighting an injustice, or she acts impulsively and we recognize the temptation, and sometimes it's as simple as wishing we could do something like that crime and get away with it. We won't be the only one who cheers on the team in Sean Harding's "The Books Job."
Many of us look to crime fiction to explore the knottier question of what is justice; several stories offer no easy answers but satisfying conclusions. The women in Gabriela Stiteler's "Money Well Spent" and in Chris Knopf's "Submission" make choices we can understand. The ranger in "As the Crows Fly" by Cheryl Malone has plenty of courage but needs something more when the line between right and wrong blurs.
The reader enters more comfortable territory before realizing she's wrong. In Beth Hogan's "Willful Blindness" the situation isn't clear until the end. Bruce Robert Coffin in "Writer's Block" lets us mislead ourselves as we listen to two writers spar.

A standard feature of many mysteries is the twist. In some stories the twist comes early and isn't the one we were waiting for. A small town gathers to await the easing of a storm before volunteers set out to search for a missing sailboat and its captain in "Out of the Reach" by Laurel Hanson. An early twist is followed by another in "At the End of the Day" by Bonnar Spring.

We like to believe our conscience guides us. Two women linked in crime take different paths in Nikki Knight's "Other Voices Carry." Then again, a strong conscience can rise up in even the most complicated circumstances. In Christine Bagley's "Sakura," a successful restaurant finds itself the object of interest of an unsavory guest.

Certain villains so fully inhabit their crimes there is no story without them. The gas jockey in "Gas" by Dale Phillips is one, and the writer in "Catch and Release" by Judith Carlough is another. At the end both leave us wondering exactly how we feel.

There is no ambiguity in the women who face challenges during World War II. In Sarah Smith's "The Woman Who Loved Her Husband's Teeth," a young war bride is determined to find her husband amid the maimed and traumatized combat victims. The search for a predator of Italians in Boston is successful in "Perfect" by Paula Messina thanks to a teenager. Resourceful and clever is the eponymous character in "Minnie the Air Raid Warden" by Ang Pompano.

In our contemporary world women have to be resourceful in different ways, mastering technology they oftentimes would just as happily ignore. But in two stories, women take on the task of mastering new devices and turn them to their own advantage. In "Graham 2.0" by Leslie Wheeler, a woman faces her own growing deafness with a hearing assist device, and in "Virtually Yours" by Kat Fast, a woman learns to hold zoom meetings.

Many of these stories leave the reader satisfied if thoughtful. A woman arrives safely and definitely wiser at the end of a harrowing entanglement in Brenda Buchanan's "Cape Jewell." In Susan Oleksiw's "The Receptionist" a young woman learns a bitter lesson. In "The Long Shot" by Avram Lavinsky, a cop in 1950s New York is assigned a murder case involving an old friend; fear of communism is rampant, gays are in the closet, and drugs hide far from mainstream America. In "The Last Stone from the House of Usher" by Moe Moeller, a guitarist survives a modern version of the fall of that house, which is as close as one can get to a happy ending in a retelling of that tale.

The writers of these diverse stories have one thing in common: the good sense to capitulate when faced with a narrator like that in Stephen D. Rogers's "Chekhov, Sartre, and the Unity of Effect."

Every year the anthology brings welcome surprises and satisfactions, and this year is no different. Welcome to crime in 2025.