The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023

by Lisa Unger and Steph Cha

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023 is a well curated annual collection of new short mystery & suspense fiction edited by Lisa Unger (guest editor) & Steph Cha (series editor). Released 17th Oct 2023 by HarperCollins on their Mariner imprint, it's 320 pages and is available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats.

There are 20 stories and they're from authors both familiar and new. The stories are varied, there were (as always) some which didn't deliver for me personally, but most were well written and competently plotted. Unusually, for this year's collection, there were no real knockout stories, including the one by Joyce Carol Oates, which should have been a given. 

One reason I like collections and anthologies is that short fiction is really challenging. It's spare and the author doesn't have a wealth of wordage to develop characters or the plotting. Well written short fiction is a delight. I also love collections because if one story doesn't really grab me, there's another story just a few pages away. It didn't quite pan out here because the collection was more or less just "okay". 

Three stars on average (with, sadly, a couple of real clunkers). It's honestly (admittedly subjectively) not up to the predecessor volumes in the series. Maybe next year. Worth it for completists who always buy this series, and for public library acquisition.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.