Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, November/December 2017, Vol. 62, Nos 11 & 12

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As the days grow short and winter looms, lengthening evenings offer time and reason to brood over the nature of darkness. As the stories in this issue attest, a landscape of shadows offers far too many opportunities for both deception and misperception.

One navigator of the shadows is postwar Manhattan private investigator Memphis Red, who confronts shifting motives, political alliances, and even identities in L. A. Wilson Jr.’s “Harlem Nocturne.” Meanwhile, a young woman seeks the shadows trying to escape the consequences of a lapse in judgment in S. L. Franklin’s “Damsels in Distress.” The shadow of calamity leaves a western town vulnerable to a charismatic itinerant preacher in Gilbert Stack’s “Pandora’s Hoax.”

The idea of a serial killer casts its own shadow, the residents of Laskin find in Eve Fisher’s “Darkness Visible.” Neighbors in Robert S. Levinson’s “The House Across the Street” know something about serial killers too—and speaking of neighbors, a suspected witch in Kilgore, Texas beguiles her hapless neighbor in William Dylan Powell’s “The Darkness and the Light.”

Photographer Anita Ray takes up the cause of an American mathematician-turned-nun who is brutally attacked but who refuses to talk to the police in Susan Oleksiw’s “A Slight Deviation from the Mean.” And Tara Laskowski gets into the head of another woman in a brutal situation in her short-short “Hostage.”

To mitigate the darkness, mid-level coworkers wreak their own special brand of havoc in plain sight in Robert Lopresti’s “The Chair Thief,” while R. T. Lawton’s Holiday Burglars return in “Black Friday,” facing their competition.

We welcome back Carol Cail, with her tale of mysterious goings-on at a seniors’ community in “Ghost Busters.” And we welcome Anna Castle, whose first story for us is “For Want of a Book,” featuring a young Francis Bacon.