Review by Annabel
Flame Tree Publishing’s anthology series, ‘Beyond & Within’ has a broad remit to collect short stories from a variety of genres. Their latest crime collection, Guilty Secrets, was reviewed by Karen last week at Shiny. Published together with Guilty Secrets, Best Served Cold comprises a selection of chilling tales of revenge; crime again, but psychological drama tinged with horror. Like the other volumes in this series, it’s an attractively produced hardback, with foiled covers, sprayed edges and a double ribbon bookmark, nicely set out on the thick off-white pages.
The editors have previously collaborated on Folk Horror and Witchcraft anthologies in this series. The authors are a mixture of new and well-known; you may recognise John Connolly, Helen Fields, William Hussey, Victoria Selman and Ronnie Turner. The other authors were new to me; indeed, some of them were selected from open submissions. The editors introduce the collection and the themes within in the introduction, and the volume is bookended by biographies of all the contributors. Most of the stories are new, only a few have been previously published.
The editors introduce the overall theme of revenge by considering some classic examples, e.g. Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo and Wuthering Heights, but the theme comes into its own in crime novels, from Hammett’s Red Harvest to Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, one of the most celebrated revenge mysteries.
The book starts off with an absolute cracker from Guy Morpuss titled ‘Ghosted’ in which a ghost writer takes revenge on the celebrity who took total credit for the book they wrote for him, despite not realising that the ghost writer had written in a sub-plot of their own based on an unsolved cold case, which, when the celeb is lured to a church, will be re-enacted. A real chiller.
My favourite was ‘How to Buy a Happy Ending’ by Terry Edge. A well-off businesswoman hires a ‘life-fixer’ to get her husband out of the picture. Poor Brian! But what was he doing all the times he went to the pub? Nice and twisty, this one.
John Connolly’s story ‘The Lamia’ is a departure from his Charlie Parker crime novels, having a fantastical edge to the sting in its tail. It wouldn’t be a revenge collection without a wedding, as in Jo Jakeman’s ‘The Wedding of the Season’, and a classic staple of revenge stories given a new twist in ‘Hold the Mushrooms’ by Joanie Brittingham, just to give you a taster of some of the others.
This anthology was really enjoyable and a beautifully produced volume to hold. I’d love to check out some of the other titles in this series.
Annabel is a co-founder of Shiny and one of its editors. She also blogs at annabookbel.net
Best Served Cold, ed Paul Kane & Marie O’Regan (Flame Tree, 2026). 978-1835626009, 416 pp., hardback.
BUY at Waterstones via our affiliate link.
