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Blood on Their Hands is a Lawrence Block-edited anthology of original crime short fiction from working contemporary novelists. The volume includes pieces by Block himself, Jeffery Deaver, James W. Hall, John Lutz, Joe Lansdale, Sue Henry, and a dozen others. Block's curatorial frame is unusually sharp.
The Joe Lansdale story is the volume's strangest and best, in the particular Lansdale East-Texas-Gothic register he has been perfecting for decades. The John Lutz contribution is reliable hard-boiled. The Block contribution is comic and quiet. The James W. Hall story is one of his sharper short pieces.
Four stars. Recommended to readers of contemporary American crime fiction. The Block-edited anthologies generally are some of the most reliable curatorial sequences in the form.
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