Hutchings assembles another winning anthology (after 2004's Ellery Queen Presents Great Mystery Novellas
) with this collection of 26 mystery stories in translation, representing 15 countries and 11 languages and chosen from a three-year-old monthly series in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
. The selection includes most of the subgenres—noirs, whodunits, procedurals and thrillers—and though few of the authors will be familiar to mainstream readers, the writing is uniformly excellent. Russian Boris Akunin, who is probably the best known, contributes "Table Talk, 1882," in which his series sleuth Erast Fandorin solves a baffling crime from an armchair. The other standouts include Paul Halter's "The Call of the Lorelei," an ingenious homage to John Dickson Carr's classic impossible crime tales; and Norizuki Rintaro's "An Urban Legend Puzzle," an outstanding representative of the "new traditionalism" Japanese movement that harks back to Ellery Queen and places a premium on skillful plotting. (Mar.)
