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Rating: 
Summary: Lives Up to the Title
Review: "Best American Mystery Stories 2000" lives up to its title. It is a varied collection of (mostly) fine mystery and crime stories, many by up and coming authors. I'll confess that two or three of them didn't work for me, but that's a very small number in a book than contains 20 stories and nearly 480 pages of text. My two favorites were by two of the few old names in the collection. Dennis Lehane spins an excellent down south slice of life tale in "Running Out of Dog," while longtime television writer and children's author, the late Shel Silverstein, chimes in with the light-in-tone but still serious courtroom story "The Guilty Party." Doug Allyn contributes a fine private eye tale with "Miracles! Happen!" while Barbara D'Amato spins an on-the-road yarn with a twist in "Motel 66." Also first rate are Tom Franklin's "Grit," and the down and dirty gangster in the hospital tale "ICU." Basically, there's a mystery story here for just about every type of mystery fan, from hard-boiled detective tales, to crime stories, to amature sleuths to compelling whodunnits? Modern short stories do not get nearly the audience they should, and this is a book that deserves to be read. (Note: The 2000 "Best Mystery Stories" collection is far superior to the 2001 anthology, mostly because it has a better variety of stories).
Rating: 
Summary: I was surprised how good this was
Review: I'm not the biggest fan of mystery stories, so I was unsure of how much I would like this collection. I was surprised at how much I liked it. There were a few that I didn't like that much, but most of them were good stories and most were well written. They ranged from ok to good, better, and on up to great stories like Shel Silverstein's story, Edward Lee's twisted story "ICU", and what i think was the best, Robert Girardi's "The Defenestration of Aba Sid", which is his 'anti-Grisham' story. A great deal of the selections here come from books and there is no surprise that both Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine both had three stories in here (the most from any one place). I suppose it's because there aren't many genre magazines anymore, but a few of these stories first appeared in literary magazines. The book is a little longer (around 480 pages) than those in The Best American Short Story series, but mystery stories need a little time to unfold. It's a good selection for the mystery reader (no matter which 'type' of mystery story you like) and for those of us who don't normally read the genre.
Rating:
Summary: Promising new authors
Review: In this anthology, Donald E. Westlake includes a lot of new authors who have not yet published their first novel. I had trouble following some of the stories after reaching their conclusion (GHOSTS by David Beaty), but others show real promise for the future. One of my favorite stories is MOTEL 66 by Barbara D'Amato. It is a fairly short story that packs a lot of suspense and intrigue. The story takes place at different points in time (1971, 1985, and 1999) in which two events that happened in 1971 come full circle in 1999. There is no real ending to this story except for the one in the reader's mind. This is what a good short story should be like. It should leave the reader wondering what will happen after all the stories secrets are revealed. Another one of my favorites is WRONG NUMBERS by Josh Pryor. There are some other good stories in the anthology written by Dennis Lehane, Shel Silverstein and Jeffery Deaver.
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