Category: Crime/Mystery/Thriller

All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, General Fiction

Stumpy by Diane Dickson

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They call him Stumpy. Not his mum, she calls him by his real name, Ryan, but the others call him Stumpy. Nobody remembers where the name came from. It’s not as if he’s particularly short and he has all his limbs intact. The name seems to have grown around him and there it is.

His limbs are intact but his mind, well his mind is a different thing. If the kids who teased him had possessed a modicum of intelligence it could have been that they realised his brain is stumped but that’s probably a bridge too far for them.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, Story of the Week

Where Cherubs Sleep by dm gillis

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Vancouver 1949

There’s a direction a city takes when kids go missing. The virtues of due process are quickly abandoned, and the closet vigilantes come out. Suddenly, everyone has an opinion and a plan.

Supposition becomes fact. The police become worthless stooges, in league with the perversions of dark and faceless perpetrators. Rights and freedoms become the sole domain of the self-anointed, raging against the printed word that breaks the news.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, General Fiction, Story of the Week

Why Can’t She See The Difference by Hugh Cron – Adult Content

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He picked up the phone and dialled. He thought that there would be no answers, no advice, just someone to listen. He wasn’t sure if that was what he wanted.

“Samaritans, you are talking to Sarah….”

He took a breath. He lifted the whisky and sipped.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

You Don’t Say No to Ituango by Amanda McTigue

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That was a person, right? That was a man.

Minka’s knee is already way too close to the steering wheel as she brakes hard. The car stops just short of a short tree. She knows that tree. Coca.

Shit.

She looks forward, not into the rear-view, because behind her is the curve. There’s no seeing around curves.

She hears thumping, dull, rhythmic. It’s her right hand smacking the map next to her, again-again, crinkling all of Colombia down into the seat cushion.

Shit.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, Historical

The Visitor’s Tale (a ghost story, after Rudyard Kipling) by Robert V. Stapleton

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‘I’ve read your tales of India,’ he said, as he sat in my study at Rottingdean, ‘so I thought you might like to hear my story.’

I’d answered a knock at my front door just as my study clock struck midday, and found the man standing on the doorstep. He had looked cold, and oddly distracted.

‘Can I help you?’ I’d asked.

‘My name is Jabez Carter,’ he’d told me. ‘I’ve come a long way to see you.’

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

In by Marie Peach-Geraghty

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The air in Detective Dane Lloyd’s former office hung warm and heavy, like something already used. He glanced at the broken air-conditioner near the tiled ceiling and sighed. His headache was half from the heat and half the beer from last night’s celebrations. His own retirement party for crying out loud, but here he was again, all hands on deck since they called him in at five a.m.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Fat Tuesday by Adam West

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For Jonas Ericsson, a junior prosecutor with the Swedish Prosecution Authority, the story began in Stockholm on Valentines Day, 2012, and ended a week later in New Orleans, USA, on the twenty-first day of February.

Fat Tuesday.

At short notice Ericsson asked his secretary to cancel a number of upcoming appointments. He then booked two weeks leave.

Five days later he landed in the United States.

The day before Mardi Gras.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, General Fiction

Margaret’s Mementos by June Griffin

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Margaret Dawson had sold linens at Macy’s for fifteen years, hating every day of it, every customer she served, and every other sales clerk, when she met her husband, Donald, a kind-hearted Manhattan policeman who patrolled West Harlem.

Marriage did not change her discontent and the birth of a premature and severely disabled baby named Bertie brought her to a simmering rage.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Son of Violence by Michelle Assaad

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Freddie knew there were some people you could disrespect and others you had to treat with reverence. He was in a restaurant looking at a man sat at the bar. He knew instinctively that this was a man who was not to be fucked with.

He looked back down at his bowl of spaghetti and ordered his wife to do the same. She did but every once in a while peeked up at the man from the corner of her eye.

She had a bad feeling about him.

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