AHMM, July-August 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Now the shabby couch perfectly complemented the worn area rug and faded curtains. The once-trendy dusty pink and pale green color scheme screamed circa 1980. Everything in the place dated from long before the Berlin Wall came down. Funny how things that looked good twenty-five years ago had a tendency to look cheesy and unappealing today. Marge had often thought this house would be a perfect makeover project for one of those television design shows, “From Muck to Magic.” But how did one actually get on those shows? And how did one person acting alone actually manage to get rid of tacky furnishings ... or cheating husbands, for that matter?

  "Don't you have any money?” The burglar spoke in a whiny voice, which didn't fit the image at all. This guy was just not her vision of a villain. Were all men destined to disappoint her? Just where were they training burglars these days—in day-care centers?

  "No money,” she said morosely. “At least not here. Apparently, it's all in an account I didn't know about. Oh don't look so surprised—I only found out today."

  "Three accounts,” she continued. “We're supposed to have three accounts. One for household, one for savings, and one for vacations to Florida. Except apparently there's a forth account I didn't know about. Maybe he's been keeping it for a surprise, huh? Maybe it's a big whacking surprise for my forty-seventh birthday next month. Yeah, and I'm Pamela Anderson's twin sister."

  Sounds of snuffling and shuffling came from the backdoor mat. Max lurched up from his position on the floor, wandered over to the man in black, sniffed one leg ("Argh!"), then the other ("Don't do that!"), and then ambled into the kitchen. He stopped right at the back door, blocking it, and flopped down on the mat.

  Marge continued to stare at the black firearm in her hand. “You married?” she asked finally.

  The burglar shook his head in earnest. It seemed to calm the shaking of the rest of his body.

  "Don't. Not worth it. I used to dream about getting married when I was a girl. No kidding, I'd dress up my Barbie dolls and spend hours rehearsing just the perfect wedding ceremony. ‘Barbie, do you take Ken to be your lawfully wedded husband,’ et cetera. You know, that sort of thing. And then Ken would kiss Barbie, and her little legs would fling right off the ground. Like this.” Marge used the gun to demonstrate.

  "But mostly I dreamed about wearing a long, frilly white dress and opening all those presents. Lovely big boxes wrapped in silvery paper with great big bows, and inside, all those wonderful surprises. That's the best part of getting married. From then on, it's downhill all the way. About as exciting as Bohemian lead crystal goblets on a shelf. Twenty-four ninety-nine a set and available in nice stores everywhere. That's what my marriage has been like. Empty wine glasses. Cheap ones. As a matter of fact ... since you're here..."

  Marge walked over to the china cabinet and reached inside with her left hand. “Take this china, will you? It was a wedding gift. What a mistake; the china and the wedding. You want it? It's Doulton."

  Marge held out a plate. The burglar shook his head.

  "Then stand back. I'm going to smash it."

  Marge heaved the plate against the wall, then another and another. That felt good. Rather fitting how they all split in two, just like the marriage they were supposed to celebrate. Too bad this Zorro-guy was such a wimp. If only he'd stop yelping...

  "This is fun. Heeeeyahh—” Marge continued heaving plates and making karate noises. “Wanna help?"

  "Goddamn looney!” The burglar muttered and yelped from behind the table barricade.

  "Gawd that feels better,” Marge said. “And a lot cheaper than my therapist. Want a cigarette?” She pointed to a pack on the dining room table.

  The burglar shook his head violently.

  "Mind if I smoke?"

  The man in black blanched. “What, are you trying to kill me?"

  Marge groaned. “Oh glory. A New Age burglar. Probably a health nut too. How did I get so lucky? I'll bet you even jog."

  The burglar nodded.

  "Vegetarian? Yogurt and wheat germ and all that?"

  "No yogurt. That's dairy."

  Marge almost choked. “I've just got to say it: You're from Vancouver, right?"

  He nodded apologetically.

  Very polite people, the West Coasters. This poor kid, he wouldn't last a month in Toronto. Marge frowned. “You know, I thought you outlaws were supposed to lead depraved and exciting lives, full of drugs and alcohol and wild sex. I mean, isn't that supposed to be the point of it all? I don't mean to be rude, but your life sounds about as exciting as a yoga class."

  "I like yoga."

  Oh dear. He was starting to sound defensive. Marge tried to be more understanding. “Frankly, I think you should lighten up a bit. Have a few laughs. For a yoga nut, you look awfully tense. Man in your line of work ... must be stressful. You need to let it all hang out. Go wild for a bit. Sure you don't want a coffee?"

  "Caffeine.” He shrugged apologetically.

  "Oh right. Well, I tell ya—this plate throwing zaps the tension out of you. I feel much better. Sure you don't want to try—wait a minute ... why don't we use the gun? Here, you hold the plate, and I'll aim for the middle of it—"

  "Argh!” screamed the burglar. He careened around the table, tore down the front hall, and flung open the far door. It opened to a small den.

  "Wait,” yelled Marge, running after him. “Wait! Don't go in there—"

  A middle-aged man lay slouched on the ancient couch. He appeared overstuffed, as did the couch.

  "Jeeze,” the burglar gasped, “is he dead?"

  "No, just a teensy bit sedated. I was thinking a pillow, but,” Marge looked lovingly down at the pistol in her right hand, “this might be perfect.” She lifted the gun, lined up the sights, and fired. The body on the couch shuddered slightly, then relaxed into the pillows for a long snooze. A crimson bib bubbled up from under the chin.

  "How do you like that? First try, even. What a neat little thing."

  "Holy shit,” yelled the burglar. “Holy, holy shit!” As Marge turned, he dodged forward and grabbed the gun from her hand.

  "Silly. I wasn't going to kill you.” Her smile beamed. “The way I see it, we have two options. You can help me get rid of the body, or ... I can call the cops. ‘Officer, a burglar broke into my house today, and he had a gun! I just got in from shopping to find the backdoor glass shattered, and my husband lying in a pool of’ ... Hey, wait!"

  The front door slammed. Marge stood by herself in the empty home and shook her head.

  "Burglars these days. Where the hell are they training them?” She reached for the phone.

  Copyright (c) 2007 Melodie Campbell

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  BOOKED & PRINTED by Robert C. Hahn

  Our three books this month share a Southern California setting. They feature a new direction for a veteran author; a star turn for a colorful sidekick in a long-running series; and an award-winning debut novel.

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  Barbara Seranella, who died earlier this year at the age of fifty, drew on her own unconventional life experiences to create her popular character Munch Mancini. According to Saranella's author bio, “she's been a hippie, a heroin addict and a biker chick,” and like Munch, she was also an auto mechanic. Her last novel, Deadman's Switch (St. Martin's, $23.95), is not a Munch Mancini story, however; instead, it introduces Charlotte Lyon, a crisis management expert in North Laguna Beach who cleverly turns her obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) into a strength. C. Lyon Communication Management provides media training and litigation support among other services, but her specialty is crises response strategy and “crisis unwinding"—managing the discovery phase and the changes that inevitably follow.

  When the Sunliner Express train, headed for the Indian casinos in Palm Springs, derails with six passenger cars jumping the tracks and the engineer and an elderly film star-turned-philantropist dying in the wreckage, Charlotte is called in by the company heads to manage the media attent
ion that follows and get to the bottom of the tragedy.

  Seranella makes the crisis management portion of her story fascinating as Charlotte works to anticipate what she can and to respond quickly to unforeseen turns of events. But it is the investigation of the accident and the investigator of the accident—Todd Hannigan of the National Transportation Safety Board—that adds the spice one expects from Seranella. Running a modern train is not an uncomplicated task and Charlotte and the reader get an education in just how complex the operation really is.

  In the course of the investigation, Seranella takes Charlotte from the polished boardrooms of Sun Rail past the stock farms and horse estates to the nearly deserted desert stretch where the train derailed and to the company's stockyard in Anaheim where their cars are refitted and repaired and tested. The end result is a cleverly plotted mystery with a most unusual and engaging hero and sharply drawn ancillary characters, ranging from Charlotte's manipulative mother to the old woman who saw aliens steal her forklift.

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  Most of us know the authors we read only through their published works. Barbara Seranella had the ability to transmute her life experiences into novels that reflected a courageous and fierce optimism. It is sad that Deadman's Switch is her last book, but she leaves a lasting legacy of personal and professional achievements.

  Joe Pike and Elvis Cole made their debut in Robert Crais's Edgar-winning novel The Monkey's Raincoat in 1987. But while Elvis became the star of the series that followed, Joe waited in the wings for twelve years before taking the leading role in 1999's L.A. Requiem. Now Pike once again takes center stage in The Watchman (Simon & Schuster, $25.95), while Elvis plays second fiddle.

  Joe Pike has always been an important element of the Elvis Cole mysteries and his return to the spotlight is accomplished in brilliant fashion by Crais, who sacrifices none of his trademark suspense, twists, and violent action. In an earlier case (The Last Detective), Pike and Cole had received help from a man whose only stipulation was that one day he would call on Pike to do a job and Pike would do it without question. Now that call has come and the job is to protect a “package” (i.e., a person) that is already “hot,” meaning an attempt has already been made on the target's life. The target is Larkin Conner Barkley, a rich brat whose reckless driving lands her in the middle of a deadly mess where even Joe Pike's considerable skills may not be enough to protect her.

  Being on the defensive is not Pike's style, and after successfully thwarting a couple of attempts to get at Larkin, Pike (and Cole) take the offensive. It's not easy when all Pike knows is that no one can be trusted—not Larkin's father, not the federal agents, not the police, not the real estate mogul nor the putative drug kingpin who supposedly wants her dead. Moving from safe house to safe house trying to stay ahead of the hunters, Pike and his charge hit Malibu, Eagle Rock, and Echo Park as they stay on the move in and around L.A.'s glamorous neighborhoods as well as its gritty industrial warehouses. Crais keeps the wheels spinning, literally and figuratively, at breakneck speed. Pike and Cole don't always play by the book, but it would be foolish to argue with the results they get or the vicarious pleasure derived from those results.

  A Stranger Lies There (St. Martin's, $24.95), Stephen Santogrossi's debut featuring ex-con Tim Ryder, has been published as the winner of the Best First Traditional Novel contest sponsored by St. Martin's and Malice Domestic. As the novel opens, Ryder and his wife Deirdre have left colorful pasts behind—or so they think.

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  As an idealistic but not naive college student near the end of the Vietnam War, Tim and several friends got caught up in the machinations of an older activist named Turret, who talked the kids into robbing a bank as a means of funding candidates opposed to the war. The botched robbery resulted in long prison sentences for both Tim and Turret, who went to prison on Tim's testimony. Thirty years later, Tim has served his time and constructed a better life for himself as a woodworker; his wife Deirdre, a drug counselor, has her own past demons to contend with. Tim's new life is blasted the morning he wakes to find the body of a young man on his front lawn and subsequently learns that Turret has just been released from prison. The investigating police officer views neither Tim nor his wife sympathetically, and Tim's first bumbling efforts to learn more about the unidentified body result in additional problems. But Tim continues to dig deeper, plumbing such disparate places as the New York club scene and a strung-out desert community as he follows faint clues from his own past and his wife's as well.

  The plot of A Stranger Lies There may be weaker than those of the veterans’ novels reviewed above, but Santogrossi writes powerfully and movingly about a man who has paid for his mistakes only to find out that he's not through paying and never will be. Tim Ryder's long strange journey is one that could happen to anyone, and that universal chord helps lift Santogrossi's debut to a winning level and makes him an author to watch.

  Copyright (c) Robert C. Hahn

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  Crime fiction connoisseur and prolific anthologist Otto Penzler presents Uncertain Endings (Pegasus Books, $23.95), a collection of classic mystery shorts with unsolved endings, ambiguous endings, or no endings at all.

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  Penzler does well to include the highest quality of storytelling from some of crime fiction's most notable authors from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries: O. Henry, Aldous Huxley, Mark Twain, and Roald Dahl, and lesser-known authors Peter Godfrey, Owen Johnson, and Gerald Kersh, each make appearances, delivering time and time again a clever premise and a vexing riddle that will at once torment and entice readers.

  Three-time Edgar winner Stanley Ellin sets the pace for the anthology, opening with his tale “Unreasonable Doubt” (1958), in which a story within a story cuts off abruptly, leaving the protagonist, to whom the story is being told, anxious and ignorant—a plot that foreshadows the formula for the eighteen stories that follow. In these otherwise frustrating riddles, the author's brusque and playful closing of the curtain is the reader's greatest reward.

  The stories in the collection often complement each other. For instance, Ray Bradbury's “At Midnight, in the Month of June” (1954), which takes the reader into the mind of a serial strangler, offers a denouement to his earlier “The Whole Town's Sleeping” (1950).

  Frank Stockton's notoriously unfinished “The Lady, or The Tiger?” (1882), tells of a young lothario whose must choose between two doors. The riddle, left unanswered, led Stockton to continue the tease in “The Discourager of Hesitancy” (1886). That story, and author Jack Moffitt's own solution to the mystery, “The Lady and the Tiger” (1948), are included in the anthology, rounding out this exemplary sampling of crime fiction's most confounding short tales.—Nicole K. Sia

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  THE WEIGHT by Tim Maleeny

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  Edward Kinsella III

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  "I found a dead pimp last week."

  Danny Rodriguez spoke the words without inflection, his eyes flat, utterly devoid of emotion. Sometimes a dead body was a friend, a partner, a fellow cop. But most days it was just another corpse. After eighteen years on the job, he'd stopped counting.

  "Anybody we know?” Sam disappeared behind his kitchen counter as he opened the door to his refrigerator, bending at the waist to retrieve another beer from the bottom shelf. He stood and gestured toward the small living room as he handed a bottle to his former partner.

  "Gracias.” Rodriguez twisted open the beer. “I needed a drink."

  Sam waved his arm in the direction of his kitchen. “This bar never closes."

  "Never?"

  Sam nodded toward the open window across the room, sunlight streaming in. “Some would say we shouldn't be drinking at all."

  "Only a civilian would say that,” countered Rodriguez. “My shift ended at six this morning. Right now, it's the middle of the night for me.” He mo
ved his chin in the direction of a clock above the stove. “What time do you pick up Sally from school?"

  "Don't worry, not till three."

  Danny raised his bottle in a quiet toast. “How's retirement?"

  "It's only been a couple of months, Danny."

  "That bad, huh?"

  Sam laughed as he took a seat on the small sofa. “I'm busy as hell but bored out of my mind."

  Rodriguez smiled. “So it's good I still come over for a drink."

  "Beats watching Oprah."

  "I was worried you were getting tired of my stories,” said Rodriguez. “Hadn't heard from you in a while."

  Sam shrugged. “Like I said, I've been busy lately."

  "Watching Oprah?"

  "I prefer Ellen, you want to know the truth,” said Sam with a straight face. “You try playing Mr. Mom sometime."

  Rodriguez shook his head. “I'm not ready."

  "You better get ready,” said Sam.

  "Still can't imagine what it's like."

  "Like nothing else,” said Sam. “You'll think your heart's going to explode. You'll do anything to make them happy, keep ‘em safe. How many more weeks till the bambino arrives?"

  Rodriguez sighed. “Three. My wife's as big as a house."

  "Don't tell her that."

  "Too late."

  Sam chuckled. “You're too honest for your own good."

  Rodriguez raised his beer. “Coming from a cop, I'll take that as flattery."

  "Ex-cop."

  "You can always come back, you know, we still got plenty of homicides. We're up to ninety this year, and it's not even September."

  Sam shook his head. “I'm not that bored.” He absently rubbed his right pant leg, feeling the hardened plastic of the prosthetic through the denim. Part of his brain still registered surprise at the lack of sensation, though at times he'd swear the leg was itching. Not for the first time, he wondered where the hospital sent all the severed limbs, and whether there was some mass grave where someone's arm lay buried next to his leg, idly scratching it for him.