Year's Best Mystery And Suspense Stories, 1987
Lorie Silano
This celebration of traditional whodunits plays with the mystery genre in a wonderfully self-referential way. Originally published in Japan in 1987, The Decagon House Murders follows a group of mystery enthusiasts who are picked off one by one while visiting an island where a murder happened a long time ago. With each new murder, the remaining members of the group must use their knowledge of the genre to find the killer and try to stay alive.
This Swedish mystery/crime novel, translated into English in 2008, became an international bestselling phenomenon. The trilogy was translated in more than 50 countries and turned into a series of popular films. In this, the first book of the Millennium trilogy, which Larsson planned to stretch for ten books before his untimely death in 2004, journalist Mikael Blomkvist teams up with hacker Lisbeth Salander to solve a mystery, leading them to uncover a deep web of corruption. It had been done before and would be done after, but this novel brought mysteries into the future, adding not only a subculture element, but also giving computers and the internet a central role in the narrative.
This of course was a reference to the mysterious golden orb discovered in the derelict underwater spaceship that takes center stage in Michael Crichton's bestselling 1987 novel, "Sphere," which became a star-studded Hollywood blockbuster unceremoniously dumped into an unloved box office abyss.
On a remote island, the perfect wedding turns deadly in this thrilling mystery. The high-profile wedding between a television star and a magazine publisher is supposed to be the perfect event. Set off the coast of Ireland, all the stops have been pulled out. Yet once the guests arrive, past conflicts come into play and someone turns up dead. Was it the bride? The best man? The wedding planner? Foley keeps you guessing until the end, giving each suspect a firm motive to want to commit murder.
One morning in 1987, coroner Cullen Ellingburgh was called to help solve the case of a woman who found at the bottom of a cliff in California. She was in her mid-20s, and had fallen down and died hours before, in the middle of the night. A cab driver was the last person to see the mystery woman alive, and she asked to take him as far as the money she had was worth.
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