
The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023
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Narrated by:
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Keith Sellon-Wright
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Christina Delaine
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Terrence Kidd
About this listen
Amor Towles selects the best mystery short stories of the year, including tales by Andrew Child, Jeffrey Deaver, and T. C. Boyle.
Under the auspices of New York City's legendary mystery fiction specialty bookstore, The Mysterious Bookshop, and aided by Edgar Award-winning anthologist Otto Penzler, New York Times bestseller Amor Towles has selected the twenty most puzzling, most thrilling, and most mysterious short stories from the past year, collected now in one entertaining volume. The volume also contains a "bonus story" selected from the bookshop's rare book room, featuring a look into the history of this illustrious genre.
©2023 The Mysterious Press; Foreword copyright 2023 by Otto Penzler; Introduction copyright 2023 by Cetology, Inc. (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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First several are Bleak, downers
- By Otis Lake on 04-07-25
By: Amor Towles - editor, and others
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The Best Crime Stories Ever Told
- By: Dorothy L. Sayers - editor
- Narrated by: Robin Bloodworth, Suehyla El Attar
- Length: 20 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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When acclaimed mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers first began compiling anthologies of the best crime stories in the 1920s and ’30s, the genre was in the flush of its first golden age. While it is hard to imagine today - after every possible mystery plot has been told, retold, subverted, and played straight again by hundreds of writers over nearly a century - in Sayers’s day there were still twists that had never been seen, and machinations of crime that would shock even jaded Jazz Age fans.
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Lot of duds, some gems
- By Regina on 11-09-13
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The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024
- By: S.A. Cosby, Steph Cha
- Narrated by: Stacy Gonzalez, Bill Andrew Quinn, John Pirhalla, and others
- Length: 16 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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In his introduction, guest editor S. A. Cosby observes that writing short stories is “a special skill that combines brevity with wit and cleverness and the hint of the existential malaise that imbues crime fiction with its gravitas.” The stories in this collection overflow with gravitas in the most unexpected ways: a cryptic note left on a windshield, a murder for hire meets a game of Mouse Trap, a swipe right on a dating app goes horribly wrong.
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Well written but Sad stories
- By Geoffrey on 04-28-25
By: S.A. Cosby, and others
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The Best American Short Stories 2024
- By: Lauren Groff, Heidi Pitlor
- Narrated by: Christina Delaine, Vikas Adam, Joniece Abbott-Pratt, and others
- Length: 17 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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“There have never been as many exquisitely built stories in existence than there are now,” proclaims guest editor Lauren Groff in her introduction. This abundance led to a volume of robust stories with the nerve to push against narrative expectations. The Best American Short Stories 2024 boasts a collection of twenty stories that “buzz with their own strange logic.” Daring and resonant, the stories in this volume invite in Groff “a feeling that both the author and I were simultaneously discovering something together.”
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Another great collection of short stories
- By Michael on 02-25-25
By: Lauren Groff, and others
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Table for Two
- Fictions
- By: Amor Towles
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, J. Smith-Cameron
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood. The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters and the delicate mechanics of compromise that operate at the heart of modern marriages.
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I adore Amor Towles!!
- By Deb Mitchell on 04-20-24
By: Amor Towles
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The Lincoln Highway
- A Read with Jenna Pick (A Novel)
- By: Amor Towles
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Marin Ireland, Dion Graham
- Length: 16 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car.
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I'm totally opposite
- By Meaghan Bynum on 10-10-21
By: Amor Towles
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Rules of Civility
- A Novel
- By: Amor Towles
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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On the last night of 1937, 25-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society - where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve.
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Bright Young Things in a Dark World
- By Michele Kellett on 08-13-12
By: Amor Towles
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The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022
- By: Jess Walter - editor, Steph Cha - series editor
- Narrated by: Desean Terry, Lindsey Dorcus, Max Meyers, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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A collection of the year’s best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by #1 New York Times bestselling author and guest editor Jess Walter and series editor Steph Cha.
By: Jess Walter - editor, and others
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Deadly Anniversaries
- A Collection of Stories from Crime Fiction's Top Authors
- By: Marcia Muller, Bill Pronzini
- Narrated by: Cindy Kay, Emily Woo Zeller, Billie Fulford-Brown, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Mystery Writers of America is proud to present Deadly Anniversaries, a collection of crime and mystery stories from some of the best contemporary authors, all of whom have been invited to put their own unique spin on what it means to recognize a certain day or event every year. An anniversary can take many forms, and by the time this group of best sellers and award winners is through, none of us will ever look at anniversaries the same way again. Edited by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini, this collection features original stories from 20 industry giants.
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Thank you narrators for telling us these stories.
- By Jennifer Baratta She/Her on 09-13-23
By: Marcia Muller, and others
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The Best American Short Stories 2023
- By: Min Jin Lee, Heidi Pitlor
- Narrated by: Laura Copland, Jeena Yi, Pascale Armand, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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“Without stories, we cannot live well,” shares guest editor Min Jin Lee, describing how storytelling affects and nurtures readers. The Best American Short Stories 2023 features twenty pieces of short fiction that reflect a world full of fractured relationships, but also wondrous hope. A lifelong friendship may become a casualty of the Russia-Ukraine war. Rejected by his lover, a man seeks to reconcile with his family. Twitter users miraculously muster enough empathy to help a lost cat find a forever home.
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Another Great Year of Shorts
- By Michael on 01-18-24
By: Min Jin Lee, and others
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The Big Book of Victorian Mysteries
- By: Otto Penzler - editor
- Narrated by: Rachael Beresford, Stephen Bowlby, Dan Calley
- Length: 37 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Edgar Award winner Otto Penzler returns with a new anthology of exhilarating mysteries, assembling Victorian society's lords and ladies and most miserable miscreants. Behind the velvet curtains of horse-drawn carriages and amid the soft glow of the gaslights are the detectives and bobbies sniffing out the safecrackers and petty purloiners who plague everything from the soot-covered side streets of London to the opulent manors of the countryside. Brush off your dinner jackets and straighten out your ball gowns for these exciting, glitzy mysteries.
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Good to listen to over the holidays
- By Linda Conover on 01-01-23
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A Gentleman in Moscow
- A Novel
- By: Amor Towles
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 17 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.
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A Reprieve Amidst Ugly News, Relentless Negativity
- By Cathy Lindhorst on 08-27-17
By: Amor Towles
great and varied collection of crime stories
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Mysteries
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Loved the mystery variations and interesting storylines. Highly recommend
Very enjoyable!
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Pretty Good
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Not For Me
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