"Under the auspices of New York City's legendary mystery fiction specialty bookstore, The Mysterious Bookshop, and aided by Edgar Award-winning anthologist Otto Penzler, Lee Child has selected the twenty most suspenseful, most confounding, and most mysterious short stories from the past year."--

Eric and Andrew, with seven-year-old Wen, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake. When Leonard appears in the driveway, he is the largest man Wen has ever seen, but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over. Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, "None of what's going to happen is your fault". Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents,...

"From the bestselling author of The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and The Devil and the Dark Water comes an inventive, high-concept murder mystery: an ingenious puzzle, an extraordinary backdrop, and an audacious solution. Solve the murder to save what's left of the world. Outside the island there is nothing: the world was destroyed by a fog that swept the planet, killing anyone it touched. On the island: it is idyllic. One hundred and twenty-two...

"The entire city around Hannah Ashton is empty, except for one other person: Leo Sterling. Stuck with only each other, they explore a world with no parents, no friends, and no school. Hannah doesn't have to be just an overachieving, music-box-perfect ballerina, and Leo can be more than a slacker, 80s-glam-metal-obsessed guitarist. Together they search for answers amid crushing isolation. But while their empty world may appear harmless, it's not. Nothing...

Seventeen-year-old Vivian Apple never believed in the evangelical Church of America, unlike her recently devout parents. But when Vivian returns home the night after the supposed "Rapture," all that's left of her parents are two holes in the roof. Suddenly, she doesn't know who or what to believe. With her best friend Harp and a mysterious ally, Peter, Vivian embarks on a desperate cross-country roadtrip through a paranoid and panic-stricken America

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"Milo Connolly has managed to survive most of high school without any major disasters...Even so, all he wants his senior year is to fly under the radar. Everything is going exactly as planned until the dreamy and charismatic Marcos Price saunters back into his life after a three-year absence...To make matters worse strange things have been happening around his sleepy Florida town ever since Marcos' return...Milo and Marcos find themselves faced with...

Born half-grown in a world that is being destroyed, Fisher has instinctive knowledge of many things, including that he must avoid the robot that knows his name.

"'My name's Griz. My childhood wasn't like yours. I've never had friends, and in my whole life I've not met enough people to play a game of football. My parents told me how crowded the world used to be, but we were never lonely on our remote island. We had each other, and our dogs. Then the thief came. There may be no law left, but if you steal my dog, you can at least expect me to come after you. Because if we aren't loyal to the things we love,...

"Delhi, the near future: a former journalist goes in search of answers after she finds herself stripped of identity and citizenship and thrust into a vast conspiracy involving secret detention centers, government sanctioned murders, online rage, nationalist violence, and a figure of shifting identifies known as the "New Delhi Monkey Man." Bhopal, 1984: an assassin hunts a whistleblower through a central Indian city that will shortly be the site of...

In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city's erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare's child. Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise "their" child together and create a new kind of family.