The best-selling author Carl Hiaasen takes the reins for the eleventh edition of this series, featuring twenty of the past year’s most distinguished tales of mystery, crime, and suspense. Laura Lippman introduces us to a suburban soccer mom who moonlights as a call girl and who has a fateful encounter with a former client at her son’s soccer game. Ridley Pearson traces a famous author of horror tales who becomes trapped in a real one after his wife vanishes while jogging. Joyce Carol Oates travels to a New Jersey racetrack where the animals that break down are of the two-legged type. Lawrence Block tells the story of Keller, a hitman for hire who happens to live in Greenwich Village, loves spicy food, and collects stamps as a hobby. And Scott Wolven plunges us into the world of an ex-con who takes a job at a private and very illegal Nevada racetrack where each day millions are won and lost. Mostly lost. As Carl Hiaasen notes in his introduction, “The stories in this collection would do honor to any anthology of short literature. More than transcending the genre of crime, they blow away its nebulous boundaries.” The Best American Mystery Stories 2007 is a powerful collection certain to delight mystery aficionados and all lovers of great fiction

Brand-new stories by: John Burdett, Henry Blodget, Peter Blauner, Jason Starr, Megan Abbott, Reed Farrel Coleman, Stephen Rhodes, Twist Phelan, Tim Broderick, Jim Fusilli, David Noonan, Richard Aleas, Lawrence Light, James Hime, Mark Haskell Smith, Peter Spiegelman, and Lauren Sanders. From a distance — on television, say, or in the pages of the business section — it looks like such a clean, well-lighted place, a place where decisions to buy or sell are guided by formulas and subtle strategy, and thorough, dispassionate consideration of all available facts. A place where cool reason prevails. And sure, that’s one version of Wall Street — call it the CNBC edition. But this book is about another place, just beneath that shiny surface — a place where fear and greed have always held sway. Think WorldCom or Tyco; think Enron. Think Gordon Gekko. Wall Street Noir illuminates a place whose boundaries have spread well beyond Trinity Church and the East River. In today’s relentlessly global economy, Wall Street is everywhere: a borderless, virtual city encompassing Midtown Manhattan, Main Street, U.S.A., the maquilas of Honduras, the office towers of Shanghai, and the brothels of Bangkok. It’s a shadowy metropolis, as the stories in this exciting collection reveal, and one that’s far more Jim Thompson than Warren Buffet