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Anyone who is old enough to remember what great fun it was to crack open a brand-new magazine (from Black Mask to Collier's) and discover two or three excellent stories by your favorite writers will beam with pleasure at Otto Penzler's Murder and Obsession. As in his two previous volumes of original stories (Murder for Revenge and Murder for Love), Penzler knows how to pick a wide and deep variety of writers and then coax them into producing their best work. In "Burglary in Progress," Kent Anderson brings back his errant hero Hanson from Sympathy for the Devil and Night Dogs for a short but spectacular burst of urban angst. James Crumley's C.W. Sughrue, last seen in The Mexican Tree Duck, explodes again in a story called "The Mexican Pig Bandit." But most of the writers, from Edna Buchanan and James W. Hall to Ed McBain and Anne Perry, use the occasion to leave their series characters far behind (especially Dennis Lehane, whose absolutely riveting "Running Out of Dog" is as full of meat as most full-length novels). --Dick Adler
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