Tales of the Impossible

Edgar winner Pronzini (The Hanging Man and Other Western Stories) demonstrates his mastery of the puzzle mystery in this stellar collection. The book’s five standalone entries include cases about a hanging victim who vanishes just after falling through the gallows’ trapdoor (“The Arrowmont Prison Riddle”) and a murder in which the prime suspect appears to have shot his victim and then made his firearm disappear (“Proof of Guilt”). A middle section centers the protagonist of Pronzini’s long-running Nameless Detective series, with the highlight being “Booktaker,” a locked-room case in which valuable books and art go missing from a tightly secured room in a bookstore. Pronzini’s other series characters, including 19th-century San Francisco sleuths John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, get chances to match wits with clever adversaries, as in “The Carville Ghost,” which finds the detectives seeking to explain how a ghostlike “human shape” could travel over sand dunes without leaving footprints and mark up abandoned cars with its claws. Delightfully compact and devilishly constructed, these stories stand alongside Pronzini’s best work. Armchair sleuths will be thrilled. (Oct.)