In more than two dozen stories garnered from the award-winning Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and never before anthologized, this superb collection features the finest mystery writers of the 1990's and some of their most popular creations: Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder, John Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey, Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse, Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone, all of them facing the challenges of baffling new cases.

Top-shelf authors like Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Bradbury, and Peter Lovesey share these pages with such rising stars as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. Suspense veteran Ruth Rendell traces the spiraling obsession of a successful business woman in "Clothes," Andrew Vachss turns a policeman's search for celebrity into a dark interlude in "The Perp Walk," and in "Speak No Evil" Nancy Pickard creates a serial killer with the worst religious complex since Satan.

The Cutting Edge offers the best of the mystery genre's varieties- pure suspense, private-eye investigations, police tales, and classical whodunits- all with a contemporary twist.

Contents:

• Looking for David by Lawrence Block
• Death Cup by Joyce Carol Oates
• Disposing of Mrs. Cronk by Peter Lovesey
• Solo by Marcia Muller
• Herbert in Motion by Ian Rankin
• Cedar Savage by Doug Allyn
• Guilt Trip by Val McDermid
• Dead as a Dodo by Colin Dexter
• Out There in the Darkness by Ed Gorman
• Yuletide Justice by William Bernhardt
• Rumpole and the Nanny Society by John Mortimer
• Speak No Evil by Nancy Pickard
• Hole in Two by Ralph McInerny
• Perp Walk by Andrew Vachss
• Star of the Silver Screen by Janice Law
• Unmarked Graves by George C. Chesbro
• Clothes by Ruth Rendell
• In This House of Stone by Jeremiah Healy
• Remembrance by Carolyn G. Hart
• The Cancellation by Reginald Hill
• Christ’s Tears by Kate Wilhelm
• Night Train to Babylon by Ray Bradbury
• Bird of Paradise by John Harvey
• Luminarias Make It Christmas-y by Janet LaPierre