Nothing Good Happens After Midnight: An Anthology Edited by Jeffery Deaver

 I thought that I rarely posted about short story anthologies for this blog.  While it's true that this is the first one that I've reviewed here in 2020, I discovered that I'd posted a total of 13 fiction anthology reviews in this blog's history.  The last one was a review of an anthology whose authors were from nations that had been banned from the U.S. in 2017 called Banthology.  That post appeared in 2018 here.

Nothing Good Happens After Midnight is a more traditional type of anthology.  It's a collection of mystery stories edited by bestselling author, Jeffery Deaver.   I received a review copy from Suspense Magazine, the publisher of this anthology.  

                                     

 

I generally find that when I read an anthology my reactions to particular stories might be anywhere on the positive to negative scale regardless of the authors' reputations.  So it's not astonishing that  I didn't love all the stories in this one, but I did think that Deaver saved up the best tales for last.   

My personal favorite was the final story,  "ATM" by Jon Land.  It's  a heartwarming modern fairy tale in which a man who never had any luck learns that kindness and generosity pays with the help of a rather extraordinary ATM.

I also really enjoyed the second to last story,  "Tonight is the Night" by Shannon Kirk in which there are serial killers, but there is also a wonderful dog and true love.

To a lesser degree, I liked "The Sixth Decoy" by Paul Komprecos because it centrally involved bird carvings.  I also liked Heather Graham's "Midnight in the Garden of Death" which dealt with ghosts and the historical legacy of a murder as well as a modern serial killer.  There were other stories by authors I'd previously read in this anthology, but Heather Graham's contribution was the only one by a familiar author that I enjoyed.

"Cell Phone Intolerant" by Kevin O'Brien stood out as very unusual, but I also found it disturbing.  Some readers  may like that sort of story. I read mysteries to be intellectually challenged by the whodunit puzzle, not disturbed.

My next read will be a thriller, and I hope I will be less ambivalent about it than I've felt about this anthology.