“Daddy-O”, by David Alexander, is another winner-a creepy old man blackmails two sisters into letting him move in and attend to his every insane fatherly whim. This one was genuinely creepy and even had me a bit nervous. In “Secret Recipe”, by Charles Mergandahl, a man has important dinner guests, but his psychotic wife may be serving a main course out of his nightmares. In Lawrence Treat’s “The Man Who Got Away with It”, a murderer who has since assumed a new life and identity can’t resist tempting fate by visiting the woman he killed for. In Richard Deming’s “A Little Sorocide”, a ridiculously meek man plots to kill his domineering sister with poison, and thinks naturally go completely off the rails. “Assassination”, by Dion Henderson, has a security agent making sure a dignitary is safe on the way to the airport-but the agent isn’t quite what he seems. In William Logan’s “A Gun with a Heart”, a hit-man struggles with his conscience when he’s ordered to kill his good friend. An escaped killer hides out at a wax museum of famous killers, not suspecting something bizarre going on there. Robert Arthur, who is the actual editor and “stand-in” for Hitchcock for this this volume and many (most?) of the others, contributes “…Said Jack the Ripper”. And speaking of twists, in Robert Bloch’s “Man with a Hobby”, a conversation between two bowlers at a bar ends with police searching the area for a brutal serial killer-and Bloch’s famously twisted touch. Like the story previous to it, I saw the twist coming, but still really enjoyed the story. “Death of Another Salesman”, by Donald Honig, is a clever story about a salesman who suspects a woman has been murdered in the motel room next to his. I saw the twist coming at about the halfway point, but that did nothing to diminish my enjoyment of this one. Gilford, “The Man at the Table”, in which a poker player plays a game of bluff with a killer who has broken into his home. “Christmas Gift”, by Robert Turner, is about cops closing in on a criminal who stops to visit his family on Christmas Eve, and a surprising act of kindness. The saving grace of this story was the protagonist, Malone, who on the surface doesn’t seem very enthusiastic about his work. In Craig Rice’s “The Butler Who Didn’t Do It” a small-time lawyer is hired to find out who killed the former butler of a rich, corrupt family. James Holding’s “Where is Thy Sting?” is a fun but goofy story about a guy who uses honeybees to kill the writer his wife is having an affair with. character Pete Chambers unearths an old crime when it appears a ghost is taking retribution against the family members who killed him. Lots of great names in this one, so expectations are high…įirst up is “Ghost Story”, from Henry Kane, in which his noted P.I. Published in 1963, this one has stories dating from 1956 to 1961, all reprints from AHMM.
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