From the shelf...

Charles Ardai
Death Comes Too Late
(Hard Case Crime, 2024)

I had very high expectations for this book, and it did not disappoint me.  This is a fine collection by a writer who has, without a lot of fanfare, become one of the best writers of crime fiction working today.  There are true gems here: stories with sharply-etched characters in gripping situations, where plots move in unexpected directions.  The endings have a delicious habit of leaving you somewhere you never imagined you were headed while at the same time fitting the pieces together perfectly.

For me, the thing that brought the volume together was that most of these are family stories.  The book is full of parents and children, siblings, and spouses relating to and sometimes killing (or avenging) one another.  In this, Ardai shows that he has a working familiarity with human nature to go with his strong sense of craft; after all,  murder often begins at home.  The result is a book that often feels as real as it is entertaining.

Ardai says he writes short stories “in spite of the fact that short stories might as well be written in sand with a pointy stick.”  He is, of course, right about the typical shelf life of short fiction, but he may be wrong about this book.  To me, Death Comes Too Late lands near the top of the heap of single-author collections I’ve read, waaaaaaaaaay up there with books like Joe Lansdale’s High Cotton and Stephen King’s  Night Shift.  Collections this good tend to stick around a while.
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I could identify some favorites, but that could keep us here all day.  Do yourself a favor: stop reading this and go read the book instead.   

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