The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year, 2022

Editor and bookshop proprietor Penzler’s (The American Gun Mystery) latest collection of the year’s best mystery stories, guest edited and with an introduction by Paretsky (“V.I. Warshawski” novels), is an absolute audio treat. The anthology includes a number of classic whodunits—in some, listeners may know who did it, but the real mystery is discovering why. Featured authors include literary luminaries such as Colson Whitehead (“The Theresa Job”), Joyce Carol Oates (“Detour”), Michael Connelly (“Avalon”), and Jo Nesbø (“Black Knight”), and showcase settings as seemingly ordinary as Christmas in Jacksonville, FL (Keith Lee Morris’s “Sleigh Bells for the Hayride”), or as unsettling as Susan Frith’s “Better Austens,” which describes a book club with an unthinkable twist. Narrator Daniel Thomas May, of The Walking Dead fame, lends his superb narrating skills to the mystery genre, employing a deadpan inflection that doesn’t give away the ending. Narrator Rachel Perry joins May, alternating stories and providing outstanding characterizations that keep the narratives flowing.