Right after Thanksgiving, Jewel Moore, my aunt, proclaimed: “What we need is some good old-fashioned Christmas spirit, with lots of peace and quiet, no drama, no chaos, or I’ll have a hissy fit!”
Margo Power, publisher of Murderous Intent Mystery Magazine founded a Short Story Mystery Fiction Society in 1996. The magazine, Mysterical-e was a spin-off from this and resulted in the Derringer Awards for stories up to twenty thousand words. The society has now grown to around one thousand six hundred members.
This week in honor of Earth Day we are once again featuring only ebooks. Here are four more mystery ones-Murder in a Good Neighborhood by K.K. Chalmers, A Deadly Denial by Kathy Bennett, The Hollow House by Janis Patterson, Halloween Thirteen: A Collection of Mysteriously Macabre Tales by Bobbi A. Chukran, and The Case of the Murderous Mermaid and Others by Andrew MacRae.
While the term “cozy-noir” may seem contradictory, it does make perfect sense in this collection of thirteen stories that embrace the mix of dark moodiness within familiar suburban settings. While the stories often take place in the small communities familiar to most cozy mysteries, often simmering just beneath the surface is a sense of menace and betrayal that edges them over to the noir side of fiction.
One October night fifteen years ago while laying in a cold, dark hospital room I saw the Angel of Death (or was it the Grim Reaper?) silently wisping down the corridor and into the room across the hall.
