Onyx

An ancient code: A clay tablet covered in ancient writing is found by an English couple in Morocco. A day later they are dead, killed in a car crash. But where is the relic they died to protect?

James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, series editor of the annual The Best American Mystery Stories, mined one hundred years of writing—1910–2010—to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir’s twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain’s “Pastorale,” and its post-war heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan Hunter. Packing an undeniable punch, diverse contemporary incarnations include Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane, and William Gay, with many page-turners appearing in the last decade.

Carson Ryder and Harry Nautilus, homicide detectives on the Mobile, Ala., police force, hit the ground running in Kerley's appealing third suspense novel (after The Hundredth Man and The Death Collectors). In a race against other cops, the pair take up the case of a young journalist, Taneesha Franklin, who's been slashed to death. The victim was close to Carson's girlfriend, TV reporter Dani Danbury, who was mentoring her. Almost every trail leads in some fashion to the Kincannons—a family with great wealth, skeletons in the closet and a matriarch with tenuous control over her fractious, unstable sons.

Pebble-hunting is a pleasant hobby that makes little demand upon one’s patience and still less upon one’s physical energy. (You may even enjoy the hunt from the luxurious sloth of a deck chair). One of the true delights of the pebble-seeker is to read the stories in the stones – to determine whence and by what means they came to be there. We must always bear in mind that a pebble is a transient thing. It is in the half-way stage of a long existence . . .