An unprecedented collective features pairings by 23 best-selling and critically acclaimed suspense writers, who in short high-action stories pit their most popular characters against one another.

Rye Mallett, a fearless "freight dog" pilot charged with flying cargo to far-flung locations, is often rough-spoken, usually unshaven, and he never gets the regulation eight hours of shut-eye before a flight; but he does have a rock-solid reputation. He will fly in the foulest weather, day or night, and deliver the goods safely to their destination. So when Rye is asked to fly into a completely fogbound Northern Georgia town and deliver a mysterious...

"Dawn Schiff is strange. At least, everyone at work thinks so. She never says the right thing. She has no friends. And she is always at her desk at precisely 8:45 a.m. So when Dawn doesn't show up to the office one morning, her coworker Natalie Farrell -- beautiful, popular, top sales rep five years running -- is surprised. Then she receives an unsettling, anonymous phone call that changes everything ... Now, Natalie is irrevocably tied to Dawn as...

"Tessa Jamison couldn't have imagined anything worse than losing her beloved twin girls and husband--until she was convicted of their murder. For ten years, she has counted off the days in Florida's Correctional Center for Women, fully expecting to die behind bars. Fighting to prove her innocence holds little appeal now that her family's gone. But on one extraordinary day, her lawyers announce that Tessa's conviction has been overturned due to a technicality,...

When his beloved younger wife and protegé is rendered a top player in the international art scene, proud Marius introduces her to a leading journalist to cover her life story, unaware that an instant connection between his wife and the journalist will ignite powerful secrets.

The Thief is a seasoned pickpocket. Anonymous in his tailored suit, he weaves in and out of Tokyo crowds, stealing wallets from strangers so smoothly sometimes he doesn't even remember the snatch. Most people are just a blur to him, nameless faces from whom he chooses his victims. He has no family, no friends, no connections. But he does have a past, which finally catches up with him when Ishikawa, his first partner, reappears in his life, and offers...

"Six days ago, Joe Lynch was a happily married man, a devoted father, and a respected teacher living in a well-to-do London suburb. But that was before he spotted his wife's car entering a hotel parking garage. Before he saw her in a heated argument with her best friend's husband. Before Joe confronted the other man in an altercation where he left him for dead, bleeding and unconscious. Now, Joe's life is unraveling. His wife has lied to him. Her...

In kidnapping cases, the first few hours are crucial. After that, the chances of being found alive go from slim to nearly none. Alex Prevost, beautiful, resourceful, tough, may be no ordinary victim, but her time is running out. Commandant Camille Verhoeven and his detectives have nothing to go on: no suspect, no lead, rapidly diminishing hope. All they know is that a girl was snatched off the streets of Paris and bundled into a white van. The enigma...

Starting with the 2021, the annual short story anthology will now become The Best American Mystery and Suspense and the new series editor, Steph Cha, and best-selling guest editor, Alafair Burke, will select the best short mystery and suspense fiction of the year. This volume spans from a mediocre spa in Florida, to New York's gritty East Village, to death row in Alabama, revealing boundless suspense in small, quiet moments and startling twists in...

"Their average age was twenty-five. They came from Berkeley, Cambridge, Paris, London, Chicago and arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure, or at least resigned to it. But hope quickly turned to hardship as they were forced to adapt to a rugged military town where everything was a secret, including what their husbands were doing at the lab. They lived in barely finished houses with P.O. box addresses in a town wreathed with barbed wire, all for...