Year's Best Mystery and Suspense Stories 1992

This consistently entertaining collection of short stories selected from mystery magazines and anthologies opens propitiously with Edgar Award nominee Doug Allyn's ``Sleeper,'' the hard-hitting tale of a TV news camera operator probing the suspicious death of a Detroit auto mechanic. In the outstanding and inventive ``Punishment,'' set in St. Petersburg ca. 1867, Stuart Kaminsky resurrects none other than Dostoyevski's per web cheery and unnerving inspector, Porfiry Petrovich. Peter Lovesey's witty ``The Crime of Miss Oyster Brown'' tells of two inseparable, secretive, middle-aged sisters, one of whom inexplicably vanishes. In Wendy Hornsby's moving Edgar Award-winning ``Nine Sons,'' an elderly teacher reflects on the Depression-era death of the sole infant and sole daughter in a large immigrant family. Hoch offers his own engaging locked-room puzzle; the familiar voices of Ruth Rendell and Bill Pronzini are also included. Although weighted toward male authors--only three of the 12 stories here are by women--this diverting collection provides a fine sampling of mystery and suspense, from the humorous and bittersweet to the tragic. (Dec.)