The Best American Mystery and Suspense is an annual anthology of North American mystery and thriller stories. Prior to 2021, its title was The Best American Mystery Stories and it was published by Houghton Mifflin through the year 2017. It has been part of The Best American Series since 1997, it is published by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.
Works for each edition are selected like the other The Best American Series titles, whereby a series editor chooses about 50 candidates from which a guest editor picks about 20 for publication. Runners-up are listed in the appendix.Deseret News, October 5, 2001 The editor of the series during 1997–2020, Otto Penzler, defined eligible mystery stories as "any work of fiction in which a crime or the threat of a crime is central to the theme or plot" and only considered those that had been written by an American or Canadian and published for the first time during the previous calendar year in an American or Canadian publication.
Series editors
Otto Penzler (1997–2020) Steph Cha (2021–)
Guest editors
1997: Robert B. Parker 1998: Sue Grafton 1999: Ed McBain 2000: Donald Westlake 2001: Lawrence Block 2002: James Ellroy 2003: Michael Connelly 2004: Nelson DeMille 2005: Joyce Carol Oates 2006: Scott Turow 2007: Carl Hiaasen 2008: George Pelecanos 2009: Jeffery Deaver 2010: Lee Child 2011: Harlan Coben 2012: Robert Crais 2013: Lisa Scottoline 2014: Laura Lippman 2015: James Patterson 2016: Elizabeth George 2017: John Sandford 2018: Louise Penny 2019: Jonathan Lethem 2020: C. J. Box 2021: Alafair Burke 2022: Jess Walter 2023: Lisa Unger 2024: SA Cosby 2025: Don Winslow 2026: Megan Abbott
See also The Best American Mystery Stories 1997 The Best American Mystery Stories 2003 The Best American Mystery Stories 2009
References