mystery and crime short fiction

Author: Editor

  • Broad Daylight by Eve Fisher

    Listen to this story on the podcast. When we arrived, Jack Olson was lying in a pool of blood on Carl Jacobsen’s study floor. The wall behind him, including the white frames around the broken window, was a mess, sprayed with dark red bits and blobs of Jack. He looked surprised at being dead. Carl…

  • 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.… Read the rest

  • 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…