1. S. A. Cosby is an Anthony Award–winning writer from Southeastern Virginia. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book, and was named a best book of the year by NPR, The Guardian, and Library Journal, among others. When not writing, he is an avid hiker and chess player. 2. Steph Cha is the author of the Juniper Song mystery series and Your House Will Pay, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller and the California Book Award, and has been a finalist for a Young Lions Fiction Award, a Macavity Award, a Lefty Award, a Barry Award, and a Dagger Award, as well as longlisted for the Aspen Prize. She is an editor and critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she edited the noir section for almost five years. A native of the San Fernando Valley, she lives in Los Angeles with her family.
<p>A collection of the year’s best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby, author of Razorblade Tears, and series editor Steph Cha.</p><p>In his introduction, guest editor S. A. Cosby observes that writing short stories is “a special skill that combines brevity with wit and cleverness and the hint of the existential malaise that imbues crime fiction with its gravitas.” The stories in this col-lection overflow with gravitas in the most unexpected ways: a cryptic note left on a windshield, a murder for hire meets a game of Mouse Trap, a swipe right on a dating app goes horribly wrong. From an eleven-year-old drawn to the neighborhood spookhouse to a scholarship kid at an exclusive boarding school, a nefarious Old West gunman to a Florida woman’s struggle against both outer and inner demons, the characters in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024 are haunted and haunting, and wholly unforgettable. </p>
