mystery and crime short fiction

  • Honeymoon Sweet by Craig Faustus Buck

    Listen to this story on the podcast. For a sweet house, right on Santa Monica Beach, it was unbelievably easy to break into. Mickey found a window he could open with a putty knife, so the double-locked doors were a joke. And Lana disabled the alarm within the forty-five-second grace period before it would have…

  • Zero Sum Game by Doug J. Black

    Listen to this story on the podcast. He’d do anything for her. No, really. Anything. Barstow was my paradise. Not something you hear very often about a Mojave town with triple the violent crime of the average U.S. city. Barstow, the idiot offspring of the gold rush and the continental railroad, is surrounded by registered…

  • Submissions Closing Jan 26

    We’ve received so many fantastic stories already that we’ll be closing to submissions for Volume V on January 26 at 11:59 pm PST. We hope to respond to all submissions within a couple of week of closing.

  • The World’s Best Coffee by C. D. Reimer

    Listen to this story on the podcast. One half-caf demitasse skim vanilla crime latte, please. The coffee shop overflowed with people drinking coffee and eating pastries when Mark walked through the doors to step in front of the pastry display case, where the separate lines for paying and picking up orders at the opposite ends…

  • Afterwards by Jeff Poole

    Listen to this story on the podcast. They say you can’t go home again, but you can’t get away again, either. After the divorce Fred Buckley used some of his frequent flyer miles to leave it all behind. It had been an acrimonious affair. He traveled a lot for his job, so he’d piled up…

  • Plan B Open to Submissions

    We are open to submission for Volume V! Guidelines are here, please read them then send us your best crime story.

  • Other Wishes by Richard Zwicker

    Listen to this story on the podcast. Be careful what you wish for. Christmas wreaths, tinsel, and stars lined the smoky walls of the White Hart Pub. Memories of holidays, softened by distance, battled the harder edges of my current situation. The lack of possibilities in my dark flat once again sent me here, where…

  • The Mystery of the Missing Puskat by Lavie Tidhar

    Listen to this story on the podcast. When you’re the only detective around, no case is too small. Densley Takes On A Case He knows America well; there are cars in Detroit, and gangsters in Chicago. New York has the Mob, and Man Jew, and Broadway, and Hollywood is called La-la land and it is…

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