I read an S.A. Cosby book earlier this year and really liked it, so when I saw he edited The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024 I grabbed it up.
Cosby did a good job of picking the stories. Some of them are straightforward mysteries, some have ambiguous endings, some are gut-wrenching, like the last story in the collection which has a mother facing up to something terrible her teenaged son has done.
Some stories are very dark, like the story where a young woman who was sexually assaulted has her revenge on the attacker and his friend who didn’t intervene. One story was extremely creepy, where a young woman accepts a housekeeper job from a man she’s just met. He offers her housing in a small cottage behind his house, but she has a growing feeling something awful has happened there. There is an old bathroom in the cottage that grows full of gnats, fungus, and a rope of hair shows up in the toilet, leading her to terrifying suspicions. It was a very good, tense story.
One story follows a young woman in college who gets targeted by incels and men’s rights activists due to a video she posted on her social media. The whole story is written as if the social media is scrolling right before you. The hatred and violence conveyed by the men is very realistic if you know anything about such forums/men.
There were some revenge stories that were very satisfying, where the person murdered or framed deserved it. There are some weird ones, especially one story about a man who remediates conflicts for a living, including a conflict where two sisters who are writers are arguing over who gets to “own” a memory from their childhood. There is a stupid story about a man plotting his wife’s murder who is killed by a sandwich.
There are some truly disturbing stories that made me flinch, other stories that had a surprisingly touching streak, and some frustrating stories that abruptly stopped without any resolution. But overall this was a strong collection with a lot of suspense built into the mysteries, much like Cosby’s own work.