Best American Crime Writing: 2004 - Hardcover

Otto Penzler is the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City and the founder of the Mysterious Press and Otto Penzler Books. He won an Edgar Allan Poe Award for The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, and is the editor of The Best American Mystery Stories of the Year and numerous other anthologies.

Thomas H. Cook is the author of eighteen novels, one of which, The Chatham School Affair, won an Edgar for best novel of the year, and two true-crime books, one of which, Blood Echoes, was nominated for an Edgar.

Nicholas Pileggi was a reporter for the New York City Desk of the Associated Press for seventeen years before moving to New York magazine. He is the author of Blye, Private Eye; Wiseguy; and Casino. Wiseguy (aka Goodfellas) and Casino were both turned into films, which Pileggi cowrote with director Martin Scorsese. He lives in New York.

A riveting new anthology series—a year’s worth of the most powerful, the most startling, the smartest and most astute, in short, the best crime journalism.

Scouring hundreds of publications, guest editor Nicholas Pileggi, and series editors Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook have created a remarkable compilation of the best examples of the most current and vibrant of our literary traditions: crime reporting. Ranging in style from Mark Singer’s ribald “The Chicken Warriors,” an up-close look at the tawdry, wildly popular, illegal world of cock-fighting, to David McClintick’s harrowing “Fatal Bondage,” the tale of a grifter with an attraction to sado-masochistic sex and serial killing, this collection showcases the wide variety of writing in the field today.

Criminal behavior itself also falls into a spectrum, from the isolated and idiosyncratic misdeed, such as that documented in Skip Hollandsworth’s “The Killing of Alydar,” an investigation into the greed that spawned the killing of a thoroughbred horse, to the large-scale malignancies that can shake an entire nation, as recounted in “The Day of the Attack,” Nancy Gibbs’s sobering retelling of the events of September 11, 2001.

Good crime writing is never just about the crime or the criminals, so this collection also has moving and often troubling portraits of the victims, their families, and the communities in which they lived, and, in pieces such as D. Graham Burnett’s “Anatomy of a Verdict,” a reminder of the immensely difficult process that is coming to judgment.

Entertaining, at times alarming, Best American Crime Writing is compelling evidence of the furthest reaches of human behavior.