Death on a Cold Night

A mystery is a story that revolves around a crime and its solution. Death on a Cold Night is a collection of short mysteries hand-picked by award-nominated mystery author, Jess Faraday, to provide a taste of a wide variety of ‘mysteries,’ as well as to form a harmonious and complimentary collection. Since Edgar Allan Poe popularized the detective story in the 19th century, the mystery genre has expanded to include a wide range of setups and situations, from the cozy,...
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A mystery is a story that revolves around a crime and its solution. Death on a Cold Night is a collection of short mysteries hand-picked by award-nominated mystery author, Jess Faraday, to provide a taste of a wide variety of ‘mysteries,’ as well as to form a harmonious and complimentary collection. Since Edgar Allan Poe popularized the detective story in the 19th century, the mystery genre has expanded to include a wide range of setups and situations, from the cozy, represented here by Cris de Borja’s A Theft of Teapots, to the ripped-from-the-headlines crime stories exemplified by Lee Mullins’s Burnt December. Sleuths, also, come in many forms: a precocious child, like the narrator of Death Benefits by Emily Baird; an unemployed person marking time on public transport, like the protagonist of Mark Hague’s In the Public Eye; Kirk VanDyke’s mountain cabin caretaker in The Afternoon of the Storm, or a quick-thinking assistant movie producer, like the main character of Wendy Worthington’s story, Snow in Winter. Over the last decade or so, there has been a trend toward including supernatural elements in mystery fiction, as well as other genres. We have included two excellent examples for your reading pleasure, whether your tastes run to vampires (Christalea McMullin’s Club Pandemonium) or toward Native American legends come to life (Leonhard August’s Storm of Mystery.)