The 20 stories that Abby L. Vandiver has rounded up for Midnight Hour: A Chilling Anthology of Crime Fiction from 20 Authors of Color would have made excellent source material for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and not just because that classic anthology series was sorely lacking in color.
Vandiver, who also writes as Abby Collette (A Game of Cones), has collected work with reliably inventive plots. In David Heska Wanbli Weiden's "Skin," a Native man trying to go clean is persuaded by a lawyer originally from "the rez, where he'd grown up" to take one more dirty job: the lawyer's client will pay $2,000 for the theft of a rare book made out of "Indian skin." In Frankie Y. Bailey's "Nighthawks," while a white nurse with a secret is being held up with several other customers at a diner by a man in a face-concealing mask, she notes that he seems to be trying to convince his hostages that he's Black. In V.M. Burns's "The Vermeer Conspiracy," a rich white man commissions a Black artist to restore a masterpiece, unaware that the artist has been plotting an act of revenge against him for decades.
One of the pleasures of Midnight Hour is that at the end of quite a few stories, characters reveal that they aren't what they initially appeared to be. While race doesn't figure into every story, it's hard not to read these identity twists as comments on the pernicious stereotyping that some of the book's offerings document and obligingly eviscerate. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer