Our 69th issue is being put together in the chaos of the holiday season. It’s hard, but the team always manages to pull things together at the last minute! So I’ll just say best wishes from everyone at Wildside and Black Cat Weekly…Michael Bracken, Barb Goffman, Sam Hogan, Darrell Schweitzer, Cynthia Ward, Karl Wurf, and me. And I will note that we have two original stories this issue, by Phyllis Ann Karr and James A. Hearn, along with our usual mix of classics and modern tales. A...

Do you remember collecting shrapnel and listening to Children's Hour? Carrying gas masks or sharing your school with evacuees from the city? The 1940s was a decade of great challenge for everyone who lived through it. The hardships and fear created by a world war were immense. Britain's towns and cities were being bombed on an almost nightly basis, and many children faced the trauma of being parted from their parents and sent away to the country to live with complete stran...

In this witty standalone masterpiece set during the golden age of silent cinema, a British vaudeville performer turned movie cop finds himself in a real-life crime story.It’s 1916, and Warwick Easton’s traveling show has landed him in California. Out of money and about to return to England, Easton gets lucky when silent movie star and “King of Comedy” Mack Sennett offers him a job performing slapstick comedy stunts as a Keystone Cop.At Keystone Film Studios...

Introducing Victorian England’s most illustrious amateur sleuth (if not necessarily its most adept): Bertie, Prince of Wales, who can’t help but poke his royal nose into a suspicious-sounding circumstance.Bertie, Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII, is a charismatic but self-indulgent man who enjoys the finer things in life, including dining, flirting, and flitting from party to party with his entire thirty-person staff in tow. But the fun and games come to ...

The chief of the Bath murder squad finally gets his say in this revealing mini-autobiography of the star character in the "superb series" (Louise Penny, #1 New York Times –bestselling author of the Inspector Gamache novels).Reader, you're about to get the truth, the inside story, the stuff Peter Lovesey never discovered. . . .Longtime police detective Peter Diamond has kept his mouth shut ever since learn...

**"I am so excited for you to be at the very beginning of this trend-setting, beautifully written, vivid series."—from the introduction by LOUISE PENNYThe first installment in one of crime fiction’s most enjoyable, iconic series—now featuring a rare peek into Diamond’s origins and the author’s process in bringing him to life.**A woman’s body has been found floating in the weeds in a lake near Bath. There are no marks on her and no murder weapon. No one will identify her. It...

Finally: the perfect stocking stuffer for the crime fiction lover in your life! With a foreword by CWA Diamond Award-winner Peter Lovesey, these eighteen delightful holiday stories by your favorite Soho Crime authors contain laughs, murders, and plenty more.This captivating collection, which features bestselling and award-winning authors, contains laughs aplenty, the most hardboiled of holiday noir, and heartwarming reminders of the spirit of the season.Nin...

Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Peter Lovesey presents a collection of short fiction spanning fifty years, including the first story he ever published and three brand-new stories.More than fifty years ago, Peter Lovesey published a short story in an anthology. That short story caught the eye of the great Ruth Rendell, whose praise ignited Lovesey’s lifelong passion for short form crime fiction.On the occasion of his hundredth short story, Peter Love...

Praise for The House Sitter:“Lovesey loves strong women, cerebral killers and diabolical puzzles—the very ingredients that make The House Sitter one of the most cunning mysteries in his Peter Diamond series.” —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review“The book sings along in great style.”—Washington Post Book World“Elegant and suspenseful.”—Los Angeles Times“An extraordinary mystery.”—Chicago Tribune...

Five thrilling tales of mystery, mayhem, and murder from an exceptional quintet of Edgar, CWA Dagger, and National Book Award winners.Crime and literature make strange and sinister bedfellows in this winning anthology of book-themed whodunits by five acclaimed masters of mystery and suspense. Multiple award-winning, bestselling authors provide the literary thrills and chills in this masterful collection of five ingeniously puzzling mysteries that belong in the libr...

“[A] vivid postwar environment that confers plausibility, ingenious plot twists that heighten the suspense and two stunning character studies that confound our facile presumptions about women who kill.” —The New York Times Book ReviewRose and Antonia were WAAF plotters during World War II, enjoying independence, a fulfilling and challenging job, and all the fun of being two women on an RAF base. But peacetime is a disappointment. Rose’s war-hero husband ha...

Detective Peter Diamond goes undercover at a seasonal festival in this delightful and bittersweet conclusion to the multi-award-winning series.Detective Peter Diamond, chief of the Avon and Somerset Murder Squad, is taking a short holiday in the country. His former colleague Julie Hargreaves has invited Diamond and his partner, Paloma, to visit the idyllic village of Baskerville (no relation to the Sherlock Holmes story, so he’s told). It turns out Julie’s invitati...