Fiction River: Past Crime

Rusch's strong anthology contains a dozen stories of "crimes that aren't crimes any longer," as she states in her introduction, stories that move from as far back as ancient Egypt to as recently as the 1970s. In Dory Crowe's "Stolen in Passing," the volume's arresting opener set in Massachusetts in 1857, two half siblings share black blood but very different fates. Set in the 1890s, Jamie McNabb's "The Bank Teller" tells how a man press-ganged onto a terrible ship seeks vengeance in Port Townsend, Wash. Dean Wesley Smith's "An Education for Thursday" features a woman avenging dreadful crimes against women in 1880 Idaho. Cat Rambo's "The Raiders" evokes the awful conditions at Andersonville during the Civil War and the struggles among the Union prisoners themselves. Rusch, writing as Kris Nelscott, tackles lynchings in the Jim Crown South in "The Monster in Our Midst," while J.C. Andrijeski sets "The Stonewall Rat" in a gay bar in 1960s Manhattan. Readers will find many impressive voices, both familiar and new. (Oct.)