cover image Yesterday in Blood and Bone

Yesterday in Blood and Bone

Michael Bracken, . . Wildside, $35 (192pp) ISBN 978-1-59224-749-3

The first entry in Bracken's story collection, "All My Yesterdays," won a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society (an organization he has been president of), and the second story, "Cuts Like a Knife," was nominated for the same award. Both are extremely brief and unoriginal efforts, with no particular flare or interest. The previously unpublished novella that gives the volume its title starts off on a more promising, Hammett-like note. Dan Fox, a young newspaper reporter who covers city hall in an unnamed city, digs into a double murder—of an older colleague facing retirement and looking desperately for one final hurrah, and of a powerful, likable alderman with a shady past. But neither thread turns out to be terribly compelling, and the older man's dialogue is studded with bad grammar and clichés that would probably have cost him his job a lot earlier. (Dec.)