If you are a lover of well-written short stories, you will definitely enjoy A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime. If you are a lover of mysteries and thrillers, you will also enjoy this collection and you may find yourself exposed for the first time to literary-quality fiction.
This is a group of such superbly crafted short stories that it should be included as required reading for a short story writing workshop. I happen to love mysteries, but both as a writer of short stories and one who has studied enough literary fiction to be a bit of a critic and a compulsive editor, I find that my tastes are sometimes too particular to enjoy some of the more popular authors. And I have been disappointed on many occasions to discover that many best-selling authors of all genres will publish a wonderful first novel, get famous, get sloppy on editing, and it's all downhill from there. I won't name them here, but many of them I just can no longer bear to read because the prose is horridly written or the characters lack any degree of depth with which to hold my interest.
This collection has sent me happily off looking for works by the authors. The tales flow quickly, but I'm spending time re-reading delectible, succinct passages and wonderful turns of phrase. The stories are full of rich, complex characters and lush atmospheric details. Mr. Deaver has edited a collection that makes for super reading for both the literary reader and the mystery genre reader!
