The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021 (Best Mystery Stories)

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By Lee Child & Otto Penzler

Publisher Description

A Wall Street Journal holiday 2021 pick

A Suspense Magazine Best Book of the Year

Lee Child selects the twenty best mystery short stories of the year, including tales by Stephen King, Sara Paretsky, and many more.

Under the auspices of New York City's legendary mystery fiction specialty bookstore, The Mysterious Bookshop, and aided by Edgar Award-winning anthologist Otto Penzler, international bestseller Lee Child has selected the twenty most suspenseful, most confounding, and most mysterious short stories from the past year, collected now in one entertaining volume.

Includes stories by:

Alison Gaylin
David Morrell
James Lee Burke
Joyce Carol Oates
Martin Edwards
Sara Paretsky
Stephen King
Sue Grafton (with a new, posthumously-published work!)

And many more!

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About Lee Child

Lee Child was born on October 29, 1954, in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham. By coincidence he won a scholarship to the same high school that JRR Tolkien had attended. He went to law school in Sheffield, England, and after part-time work in the theater he joined Granada Television in Manchester for what turned out to be an eighteen-year career as a presentation director during British TV’s “golden age.” During his tenure his company made Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker. But he was fired in 1995 at the age of forty as a result of corporate restructuring. Always a voracious reader, he decided to see an opportunity where others might have seen a crisis and bought six dollars’ worth of paper and pencils and sat down to write a book, Killing Floor, the first in the Jack Reacher series.

Other books by Lee Child

In Too Deep

Lee Child & Andrew Child

$14.99

The Secret

Lee Child & Andrew Child

$7.99

No Plan B

Lee Child & Andrew Child

$9.99

Alistair MacLean's War

Mark Simmons & Lee Child

$29.99

Jack Reacher

Lee Child

$2.99

Reacher: Killing Floor (Movie Tie-In)

Lee Child

$9.99

Killer Year: Stories to Die For

Lee Child & J.T. Ellison &

$7.99

Better Off Dead

Lee Child & Andrew Child

$7.99

How to Write a Mystery

Mystery Writers of America & Lee Child &

$14.99

The Sentinel

Lee Child & Andrew Child

$7.99

The Nicotine Chronicles (Akashic Drug Chronicles)

Blue Moon

James Penney's New Identity

Lee Child & James Patterson

$8.99

Faking a Murderer

Kathy Reichs & Lee Child

$0.99

Invisible Blood

Maxim Jakubowski & Lee Child &

$9.99

Exit Wounds

Paul Kane & Marie O'Regan

$8.99

Cleaning the Gold

Karin Slaughter & Lee Child

$8.99

Past Tense

Lee Child

$7.99

The Christmas Scorpion: A Jack Reacher Story

Lee Child

$1.99

Otto Penzler

Otto Penzler, the creator of American Mystery Classics, is also the founder of The Mysterious Press (1975); MysteriousPress.com (2011), an electronic-book publishing company; and New York City’s Mysterious Bookshop (1979). He has won a Raven, the Ellery Queen Award, two Edgars (for the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, 1977, and The Lineup, 2010), and lifetime achievement awards from NoirCon and The Strand Magazine. He has edited more than 70 anthologies and written extensively about mystery fiction.