Former model and world traveler—in her early days she drove overland from Europe to India and the Himalayas via the Silk Route—Mary Anne Kelly returned to hometown Richmond Hill, Queens, New York, to write. From Park Lane South, Queens to Pack up the Moon, her Claire Breslinsky series portrays in mystery the life she leads.
Now settled in Rockville Centre, Long Island, with her husband and son, Mary Anne composes fiction and writes songs from the grandfather chair in her kitchen. She is currently on location in Munich, researching her next novel.
Tony Broadbent is the author of a series of mystery novels about a Cockney cat burglar in austerity-ridden, black market–riddled postwar London who gets blackmailed into working for MI5.
The first novel in the series, The Smoke, received starred reviews and was named “one of the best first mystery novels of 2002.” Spectres in The Smoke, the follow-up, received the Bruce Alexander Historical Mystery Award in 2006 and was proclaimed by Booklist “one of the best spy novels of the year.” The third in the series, Shadows in The Smoke, was published in 2012. Skylon in The Smoke is next in the series.
Tony has written for newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and film and works as a consulting brand strategist and ideator. He was born in Windsor, England, and now lives with his American wife in Mill Valley, California.
Steve Berry is a New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author who mixes action, history, secrets, conspiracies, and international settings into pulse-pounding contemporary thrillers. He is the creator of the Cotton Malone series, which started with The Templar Legacy and continued with The Alexandria Link, The Venetian Betrayal, The Charlemagne Pursuit, The Emperor’s Tomb, The Jefferson Key and his latest, The King’s Deception. He also has four stand-alone thrillers—The Amber Room, The Romanov Prophecy, The Third Secret, and his latest, The Columbus Affair—along with three e-book originals, The Balkan Escape, The Devil’s Gold, and The Admiral’s Mark. His books have been translated into forty languages and are sold in fifty-one countries worldwide. He lives in the historic city of St. Augustine, Florida. He and his wife, Elizabeth, founded History Matters, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving our heritage. To learn more about Steve, his books, and the foundation, visit www.steveberry.org.
After law school, Angela Gerst moved from New York to Massachusetts and over the years worked as a journalist, as a campaign consultant, in magazine sales, and in marketing. Long an admirer of Colette’s fiction, she wrote “The Secret Life of Books” after devouring a collection of Colette’s own short stories.
Her first novel, A Crack in Everything, a Susan Callisto mystery, won a starred review from Kirkus and praise from such disparate writers as Lisa Scottoline and John Barth. Angela is currently at work on the second novel in the Callisto mystery series. She and her husband live near Boston. Visit Angela, Susan Callisto, and Colette at angelagerst.com.
Catherine Mambretti learned at the University of Chicago that she wanted to write, not lecture about, fiction. Haunting the library stacks there, she discovered Kate Warne, the world’s first female detective. Catherine knew, even before earning her PhD in literature, that she had to write about “The Very Private Detectress,” a woman whose Civil War adventures included serving as the disguised Lincoln’s bodyguard and capturing a cunning female Southern spy.
Catherine is the author of a short story collection, The Evil That Men Do, and The Juror Hangs, a novel inspired by jury duty at Cook County’s notorious Criminal Courthouse. She is a Derringer Award nominee and the winner of a Textnovel.com Prize for Chalk Ghost, the novella that inspired her forthcoming novel, Snow Ghost. She is an active member of Mystery Writers of America and the Authors Guild. Visit her at www.ccmambretti.com.
Stephen Ross is a failed rock musician who turned to a life of crime. His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and others. He has been nominated for an Edgar Award and a Derringer Award, and he was a 2010 Ellery Queen Readers Award finalist. Over the years, Stephen has lived in Auckland, London, and Frankfurt, but he currently resides on the beautiful Whangaparaoa Peninsula of New Zealand. He still writes and performs music, when no one is around, and he maintains a website at www.StephenRoss.net.
Caroline and Charles Todd, writing together as Charles Todd, are actually mother and son. Caroline lives in Delaware and Charles in North Carolina. They write best when not in the same room. Both travel to England to give their settings and their plots a firsthand realism. They are the authors of the Inspector Ian Rutledge Mysteries and the Bess Crawford Mystery Series, as well as many short stories.
Charles has been a corporate troubleshooter and holds a degree in business and communications. His favorite place is any beach, and his favorite team is Tar Heel basketball. He collects seashells from around the world, and he brakes for historical signs wherever he travels. A longtime Columbo fan, he is also a movie buff.
Caroline has degrees in history/literature and international relations. History has always been her first love and travel her second, although the Atlanta Braves are a close third. She collects bookmarks from the countries she visits, and shares Charles’s love of books and movies.
Jonathan Stone does most of his writing on the commuter train between the Connecticut suburbs and Manhattan, where he is the creative director of a midtown advertising agency. His four published crime novels have all been optioned for film, and when you see the proverbial pigs overhead, you can trot over to your local multiplex to catch one of them.
“When I read the parameters for The Mystery Box, I thought of a manuscript I had on the shelf that would fit perfectly. One problem: my manuscript was a novella—at 34,000 words, almost five times too long. So for me, writing ‘Hedge’ was a protracted, rigorous lesson in editing. Having it chosen for the anthology probably confirms once again that less is more. On the other hand, if anyone wants me to expand the short story into a novel?… hey, I’m your guy.”
A graduate of Yale, Jon is married, with a son in college and a daughter in high school.
Katherine Neville has been described as the female Umberto Eco, Alexandre Dumas, and Steven Spielberg. Her first swashbuckling adventure/quest novel, The Eight, was credited by Publishers Weekly with having “paved the way for books like The Da Vinci Code,” and was recently voted, in a national poll by the noted Spanish journal El País, one of the top ten books of all time. Neville is the first author invited onto the board of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries; she also serves in the Monticello Cabinet of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and is a regular cochair of the Authors Guild Foundation’s annual fund-raiser. Her bestselling books (New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post) have been translated into forty languages and have pleased millions of readers around the world. She lives in Virginia; Washington, DC; and Santa Fe.
R. L. (Robert Lawrence) Stine is one of the bestselling children’s authors in history. His Goosebumps series, along with such series as Fear Street, The Nightmare Room, Rotten School, and Mostly Ghostly, have sold nearly 400 million books in this country alone. And they have been translated into thirty-two languages.
His popular TV series, R. L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour, is in its third season on the Hub TV network.
The year 2012 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Goosebumps book series, which comprises over 100 books. In the same year, R.L.’s hardcover horror novel for adults, Red Rain, was published by Touchstone Books.
In 2011, R.L. was honored by the International Thriller Writers as ThrillerMaster at their annual banquet. R.L. lives in New York City with his wife, Jane, an editor and publisher, and their King Charles spaniel, Minnie.
Karin Slaughter has written twelve books that have sold a combined thirty million copies in thirty-two different languages. A longtime resident of Atlanta, she splits her time between the kitchen and the living room.
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1 Long skinned the most squirrels (1,238) in a one-hour period.
2 At 92,365,860 passengers a year, Hartsfield is the busiest airport by volume in the world.
3 Biff Hutchison, 39 jumps.
4 Mohammed, 22.5", is the shortest man ever recorded.
5 Excluding wars and accidents, mosquitoes have been responsible for 50% of all deaths since the Stone Age.
6 In 1928, Elton was the oldest living man to find out that the Civil War had ended.
7 The canal, meant to drain the swamp into the Gulf and Atlantic, respectively, was abandoned in the late nineteenth century.
8 Taylor’s tongue measures 3.86" from the tip of his tongue to his top lip.
9 Home of the highest shade temperature ever recorded, at 136°F (58°C).
10 The average person generates .28 gallons of urine a day.
11 Jay Sloot’s tongue measures 3.1" at its maximum width.
12 Reginni is the record holder for most bungee cords (83) wrapped around his head.
13 Started in 1731 when Spaniard captain Julio León Fandiño boarded the English Rebecca and cut off captain Robert Jenkins’s ear with the behest to give the ear to the British House of Commons.
14 Organized in 1733, Congregation Mickve Israel, Savannah, is thought to be the third-oldest still-functioning congregation in the United States.
15 “Let the good times roll.”
16 Wheeler is the Record Holder for longest beard on a living person (female).
17 Maria Gomez Valentim is the oldest living person in the world.
18 7.
19 “A bad penny always turns up.”
20 Faggot.
21 “Cunt eater.”
22 “Go shit in the ocean.”
23 The Box of Hadrittah, unearthed in 1848, is believed to be the oldest wooden box in the world.
24 Longest arm hair measured.
25 Longest ear hair measured.
26 Longest eyebrow hair measured.
27 Longest nipple hair (male) measured.
28 The average person tells 57,782 lies in his or her lifetime.
29 Under ideal conditions, this whistled language is intelligible up to five miles away.
30 426 dogs assembled in Dunedin, Florida.
31 Chanel Tapper holds the record for the longest tongue in the world (female).
32 The line of hair between the pubis and navel.
33 Thirteen sculptures in one minute: a bone, a bracelet, a crocodile, a dagger, a dachshund, a dog (no breed specified), a dragonfly, an elephant, a fish, a hat, a honeybee, an Indian headdress, and a sword.
34 People who dress up as animals to have sex.
35 Before an automobile accident broke them, Redmond’s fingernails, the longest in the world, measured a total length of 28' 4½".
36 Danielle Steel holds the world record for most consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
37 Author of Eat, Pray, Love.
CONTENTS
WELCOME
INTRODUCTION, by Brad Meltzer
THE AMIABLE MISS EDITH MONTAGUE, by Jan Burke
WACO 1982, by Laura Lippman
WAR SECRETS, by Libby Fischer Hellmann
THE VLY, by C. E. Lawrence
HEIRLOOM, by Joseph Finder
THE BOCA BOX, by James O. Born
MAD BLOOD, by S. W. Hubbard
DEAR MR. QUEEN, by Joseph Goodrich
THE DELIVERY, by R. T. Lawton
MOKUME GANE, by Tom Rob Smith
ANGELINA, by Mary Anne Kelly
THE REMAINING UNKNOWNS, by Tony Broadbent
DOUBLE JEOPARDY, by Steve Berry
THE SECRET LIFE OF BOOKS, by Angela Gerst
THE VERY PRIVATE DETECTRESS, by Catherine Mambretti
THE BIRDHOUSE, by Stephen Ross
THE HONOUR OF DUNDEE, by Charles Todd
HEDGE, by Jonathan Stone
THE LUNAR SOCIETY, by Katherine Neville
HIGH STAKES, by R. L. Stine
REMMY ROTHSTEIN TOES THE LINE (annotated), by Karin Slaughter
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
NEWSLETTERS
COPYRIGHT
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Compilation Copyright © 2013 by Mystery Writers of America, Inc.
Introduction Copyright © 2013 by Brad Meltzer
“The Amiable Miss Edith Montague,” copyright © 2013 by Jan Burke
“Waco 1982,” copyright © 2013 by Laura Lippman
“War Secrets,” copyright © 2013 by Libby Fischer Hellmann
“The Vly,” copyright © 2013 by C. E. Lawrence
“Heirloom,” copyright © 2013 by Joseph Finder
“The Boca Box,” copyright © 2013 by James O. Born
“Mad Blood,” copyright © 2013 by S. W. Hubbard
“Dear Mr. Queen,” copyright © 2013 by Joseph Goodrich
“The Delivery,” copyright © 2013 by R. T. Lawton
“Mokume Gane,” copyright © 2013 by Tom Rob Smith
“Angelina,” copyright © 2013 by Mary Anne Kelly
“The Remaining Unknowns,” copyright © 2013 by Tony Broadbent
“Double Jeopardy,” copyright © 2013 by Steve Berry
“The Secret Life of Books,” copyright © 2013 by Angela Gerst
“The Very Private Detectress,” copyright © 2013 by Catherine Mambretti
“The Birdhouse,” copyright © 2013 by Stephen Ross
“The Honour of Dundee,” copyright © 2013 by Charles Todd
“Hedge,” copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Stone
“The Lunar Society,” copyright © 2013 by Katherine Neville
“High Stakes,” copyright © 2013 by R. L. Stine
“Remmy Rothstein Toes the Line (annotated),” copyright © 2013 by Karin Slaughter
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First e-book edition: April 2013
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ISBN 978-1-4555-2267-5
Mystery Writers of America Presents the Mystery Box Page 37