Volume Three of The Crooked Road, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s high-speed pursuit of fiction’s criminal underworld, makes its first stop in the urban landscape of Liza Cody’s England, where the Silver Dagger winner spins a tale of prostitution and greed in “I Am Not Fluffy”, then heads off across the U.S. with the young grifters of Art Taylor’s Derringer nominated “Rearview Mirror.” The mean streets of Detroit’s music industry feature in multiple Edgar Award winner Doug Allyn’s “The Sultans of Soul,” while New York gangsters appear in Mike Baron’s satirical “Five Stars.” Every legitimate business has its underside, as the crooked lawyers of V. S. Kemanis’s “Collector’s Find,” the pro wrestling cheats of Chris Muessig and Steve Seder’s “Death Match,” the swindlers hiding behind a catering business in Marilyn Todd’s “Something Rather Fishy,” and thugs working the auto-salvage business in Therese Greenwood’s “Wrecked” know all too well. The hit man of bestseller Lawrence Block’s “Who Knows Where It Goes” travels side by side between these covers with the hired muscle of Edgar winner Steve Hamilton’s “The Weight,” the deadly petty offenders of International Thriller Award winner Tim L. Williams’s “Where That Morning Sun Goes Down,” the poacher on the run in Edgar winner Clark Howard’s “White Wolves,” and the narco traffickers of Roger Jones’s “Clouds” and Stephen T. Vessels’ “Doloroso.” Con artists, buccaneers, and thieves take the wheel in Mary Jane Maffini’s multiple award-winning story “So Much in Common,” Toni L. P. Kelner’s swashbuckling adventure “The Pirate’s Debt,” and bestseller Jeffery Deaver’s “The Westphalian Ring.” But watch out: There’s no time to put on the brakes. . . .
