From Publishers Weekly Denton 's third novel (after Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede) takes the overworked serial-killer concept and wrings from it a striking depiction of middle-American despair, betrayed innocence, and transcendent hope. Jimmy Blackburn is a roaming murderer with an idiosyncratic moral code: he kills only those he feels deserve to die. His victims include cheating auto mechanics, bullying bosses and a thieving encyclopedia salesman. In intervening chapters, Denton traces Blackburn's childhood in small-minded small-town Kansas, in a home haunted by an abusive father, a world prescribed by casual cruelties and repressive, untrustworthy authority. Denton doesn't settle for facile connections between Blackburn's early years and his criminal turn, playing his life off against some Norman Rockwell vision of an America that never was. He portrays Blackburn's childhood not as unusually bleak or cruel, but as an all-too-common experience, so it's the reality of a mundane world-not some exceptional horror-that produces Blackburn the killer. And Blackburn himself is no simplistic figure of evil; he retains a sympathetic innocence, a stubborn hope, throughout his doomed journey, and his end yields a surprising sense of redemption. Denton 's hand never falters as he shows us an America of petty injustices and vanished dreams, where a sensitive Kansas boy can grow into a killer. From Library Journal Abused and unloved, Blackburn is a true victim of circumstance who devises his own strict moral code to guide him in all matters including whom and what to kill. On his 17th birthday, Blackburn shoots a cop who has just killed a dog in the town church. He then embarks on a career as a one-man eliminator of those who mistreat and prey upon others. Using stark, unadorned prose, Denton (Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede, Morrow, 1991) has created a modern-day parable illustrating the shades of good and evil and the meanings of life. Sometimes humorous but more often heart-wrenching, Blackburn delivers a knockout punch to rigid, self-satisfied thinking everywhere. Excellent

All new strange cases of death and magic in the city by some of the biggest names in urban fantasy.  In this all-new collection of urban fantasy stories, editors George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois explore the places where mystery waits at the end of every alley and where the things that go bump in the night have something to fear...  Includes stories by New York Times bestselling authors Charlaine Harris, Patricia Briggs, Diana Gabaldon, Simon R. Green, S. M. Stirling, and Carrie Vaughn, as well as tales by Glen Cook, Bradley Denton, M.L.N. Hanover, Conn Iggulden, Laurie R. King, Joe R. Lansdale, John Maddox Roberts, Steven Saylor, Melinda Snodgrass, and Lisa Tuttle

If you’re a fan of fiction that is more than just black and white, this latest story collection from #1 New York Times bestselling author George R.R. Martin and award-winning editor Gardner Dozois is filled with subtle shades of gray. Twenty-one all-original stories, by an all-star list of contributors, will delight and astonish you in equal measure with their cunning twists and dazzling reversals. And George R.R. Martin himself offers a brand-new A Game of Thrones tale chronicling one of the biggest rogues in the entire history of Ice and Fire. Follow along with the likes of Gillian Flynn, Joe Abercrombie, Neil Gaiman, Patrick Rothfuss, Scott Lynch, Cherie Priest, Garth Nix, and Connie Willis, as well as other masters of literary sleight-of-hand, in this rogues gallery of stories that will plunder your heart—and yet leave you all the richer for it

Otto Penzler rounds up the most cunning, ruthless, criminals in mystery fiction. The best mysteries — whether detective, historical, police procedural, cozy, or comedy-have one thing in common: a memorable culprit. For all the heroes in earnest pursuit, there are malefactors on the loose, determined to outfox their efforts and sow trouble in their wake. These are the rogues and villains who haunt our imaginations, but they often have more in common with their heroic counterparts than we might expect (and, as we shall see, some even moonlight as detectives or do-gooders themselves). The seventy-two handpicked stories in this collection introduce us to the miscreants who have schemed and slashed their way through the mystery canon over the past hundred and fifty years, captivating and confounding readers in the process. MEET DELINQUENT PSYCHES OF ALL STRIPES, INCLUDING gentleman thieves, calculating crooks, fearsome body snatchers, masters of disguise, morally-challenged lawyers, deceitful doctors, heinous hit men. charismatic con men, amoral adventurers, supernatural suspects, deviant detectives, vile villainesses, and cold-blooded killers IN UNFORGETTABLE TALES BY Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Washington Irving, Jack London, L. T. Meade, 0. Henry, Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Wallace, Leslie Charteris, Erle Stanley Gardner, Edward 0. Hoch, David Morrell, Loren D. Estleman, and countless others

This fourth volume of the year's best science fiction and fantasy features thirty stories by some of the genre's greatest authors, including Jonathan Carroll, Neil Gaiman, Kij Johnson, Kelly Link, Paul McAuley, RJ Parker, Robert Reed, Rachel Swirsky, Catherynne M. Valente, and many others. Selecting the best fiction from Asimov's, F&SF, Strange Horizons, Subterranean, Tor.com, and other top venues, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy is your guide to magical realms and worlds beyond tomorrow