Mystery Magazine

I am pleased to share that Mystery Magazine has featured one of my comic mystery short stories in their latest issue (May 2024). 

In "My Son, My Son," a Southern woman (a wife and mother) becomes exasperated by her notorious small-time criminal son, her "do-good" of a husband, and the stifling nature of her hometown.

The issue of the magazine is available to read as an ezine (via Kindle), via select library platforms, and it can also be purchased in hardcopy from Amazon or direct from the Mystery Magazine website. 

Happy Reading! Click directly on links below to purchase: 

Mystery Magazine (May 2024) 

Kindle (digital copy) Newsstand

Amazon (paper copy) 

NOTE: Back in 2019, I had another mystery short published by this same magazine (when it was called Mystery Weekly). You can learn more about that story, "To Whom It May Concern" - a comic mystery about a corporate Client Intimacy Expert, with a very high opinion of himself, whose career snowballs into a life of crime - by clicking on the link HERE.

If you like the story (and the magazine), please consider leaving a review on Amazon...and I would also appreciate your leaving (hopefully positive) reviews for my other books/work on Amazon, as well. Reviews help (struggling) authors better promote their work. Thank you :)

The Threat

A clever dark comedy about an unassuming New Yorker whose dull, stunted life takes wildly hilarious turns after he receives a death threat. 

Nathaniel Stein, writer for the New Yorker, dishes up an inventively absurdist, dark comedy about an unassuming middle-aged man whose life goes farcically off the rails in The Threat.

 

Melvin Levin is a single, conscientious, rule-following, 41-year-old with a bad back. He lives alone in a New York City apartment, and his social circle consists largely of bestowing good deeds upon an elderly neighbor. One night while Melvin is anticipating a promotion at his totally nondescript job, the boring, dull routine of his life is suddenly overturned when he receives a “plain little note” in the mail: “Mr. Melvin Levin, I’m going to kill you,” the note begins. “You’ve worn out my patients for the last time and your through…” The unelaborate note, complete with poor grammar, becomes like a “flag planted atop the mountain of bad luck” that was Melvin’s life. The threat produces a ferocious sense of anxiety in Melvin, who--having lived with “unerring politeness” and an “unceasing, almost superstitious rectitude, taking great pains to avoid rubbing people the wrong way”--struggles to decipher whom he might’ve wronged. Despite the chilling implications of the note, Melvin ultimately becomes empowered and excited by the idea of having an anonymous, formidable enemy, and he undergoes a hilarious life transformation.

 

Stein’s smart, clever first novel will charm readers with a simple premise that snowballs into a side-splitting, thought-provoking meditation about how one man’s seemingly inconsequential life finally overflows with grandiose meaning when faced with the prospect of death.

The Threat by Nathaniel Stein
Keylight Books (Turner Publishing), $27.99 hardcover, 9781684429691, 192 pages
Publishing Date: January 16, 2024

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness (February 2, 2024), link HERE