Many Deadly Returns: 21 Stories Celebrating 21 Years of Murder Squad

The fourth anthology from Britain’s Murder Squad (after 2016’s The Starlings and Other Stories) showcases the group’s talents for short fiction with a bite. Each current squad member has contributed three new stories, and three former members add one apiece. Highlights include Kate Ellis’s “The Confessions of Edward Prime,” which presents a unique solution to the problem of a man determined to confess to a crime he didn’t commit, and Ann Cleeves’s “Wild Swimming,” set just as the Covid pandemic appears to be ebbing, in which Det. Chief Insp. Vera Stanhope probes a drowning during an outing of four friends. Edwards’s “Lucky Liam” features an intricate revenge plot concocted by a cuckolded spouse. Impossible crime fans will get a kick out of Kate Ellis’s locked-room puzzle, “My Oleander,” and historical mystery devotees will find Cath Staincliffe’s “Two Birds,” set in 1871 Blackpool, memorable. Future such anthologies will be welcome. (Nov.)