The hard-charging, crowd-pleasing Back in Black: An Anthology of New Mystery Short Stories arrives on the heels of Hotel California and Thriller, all three books edited by Don Bruns and part of Blackstone's Music and Murder Mystery series. That Back in Black features not a single genteel detective nor drawing-room denouement should surprise precisely no one familiar with the like-titled testosterone fest of a 1980 album by Australian rock titans AC/DC.
The anthology's 10 stories correspond with the AC/DC album's 10 tracks, albeit in scrambled order. In Heather Graham's "Hells Bells" (blame AC/DC, not the publisher, for the missing apostrophe), this phrase, repeatedly used by a San Diego man, sets his girlfriend's teeth on edge at an edgy time: a murderer is terrorizing too-close-for-comfort Los Angeles. Several of the collection's stories go no further than using a Back in Black song title as a launchpad. In Dave Bruns's "Givin the Dog a Bone," a desert dog has something for the retired Texas smuggler who feeds him: a bone--the ulna bone of a human, that is.
Not every offering in Back in Black deserves to top the charts, but most stories should be hits with readers. As it happens, the anthology's best-known contributor, Andrew Child, is paired with the album's best-known track, "You Shook Me All Night Long." In Child's story, legendary crime fiction good guy Jack Reacher walks into a hotel bar in Mainz, Germany, carrying a gigantic boom box, and let's just say he knows how to use it. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer