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The Architecture of Murder
341 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 9, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 7, 2026
Byrnside has really hit his stride, in my opinion. This is strong stuff—his voice, his ear for dialogue, his ability to breathe life into characters with such economy, his ability to create genuine suspense, his mastery of (yes) genius loci. These are four wicked good short stories.
Multiply his readership a hundredfold and it would still be inadequate. And I think that’s a shame. I think it says a lot about literature and reading and publishing and I think what it’s saying is pretty goddam ugly.
Byrnside is one of the few writers I subscribe to, for lack of a better word. Instant buys (if not instant reads because I always have a backlog.) While he’s cooking up his new stuff, I’m having seconds and even thirds of his old stuff. I’d give six stars if I could.
Multiply his readership a hundredfold and it would still be inadequate. And I think that’s a shame. I think it says a lot about literature and reading and publishing and I think what it’s saying is pretty goddam ugly.
Byrnside is one of the few writers I subscribe to, for lack of a better word. Instant buys (if not instant reads because I always have a backlog.) While he’s cooking up his new stuff, I’m having seconds and even thirds of his old stuff. I’d give six stars if I could.
June 1, 2026
James Scott Byrnside is undoubtedly one of the most promising contemporary writers in mystery fiction. With his unique style, in which the crude, often violent, and corrupt language and scenarios of hard-boiled fiction blend with the logical elegance and thoroughness of traditional mystery without one side distorting the other, he has created memorable novels, structured puzzles and hidden clues that satisfy even the most demanding of readers.
"The Architecture of Murder" is his second collection of short stories. The title itself encapsulates the stylistic signature that characterizes the four stories in the book: the meticulous composition of plots and puzzles, in which nothing is left to chance, in which every single element is an integral part of an elaborate and precise criminal framework.
"The Architecture of Murder," while renewing the author's trademarks (the untarnished duo of Rowan Manory and Walter Williams; the degraded and corrupt urban setting where any kind of salvation seems impossible, where crime appears an inevitable fate; the impossible crimes typical of the British school of mystery; the harsh language, à la Sam Spade, combined with an irreverent and cynical irony; detestable yet engaging suspects), marks a clear evolution in his literary output.
In addition to greater characterization of the characters, who, despite their moral narrowness, acquire a depth that makes them more complex and alive, starting with a less imperturbable Rowan Manory, more involved in the cases he faces, there's a greater thematic and stylistic heterogeneity.
This is perhaps Byrnside's most experimental work, opening him up to new influences and exploring new genres without diminishing his deep passion for the deductive and logical detective story: he goes from the claustrophobic thriller ("Madmen Prefer Blondes") to the bloody and alienating horror ("The Carny Murders").
Byrnside demonstrates his versatility, leaving his unmistakable mark on a collection that isn't boring; on the contrary, it captivates and leads the readers to discover the many obsessive nuances of the (almost) perfect crime.
Killer Pete (5 stars)
Take a misanthropic inventor living in a castle in the middle of Illinois, a cowboy automaton capable of firing a shot from his revolver while mocking you, a rather irate business partner, a less-than-faithful lover, a less-than-loving son... what could go wrong?
Everything.
The wealthy and reclusive Horace Cobb is found dead inside his locked laboratory, killed by a gunshot apparently fired by his automaton, the evil Killer Pete.
The case is strange enough to require the intervention of the tough and brilliant Rowan Manory, assisted by the trusty Walter Williams.
A locked room, a phonograph that captured the deceased's last moments, a room full of strange contraptions, and a key taped to the floor... Manory finds himself in a bind as he must investigate thoroughly to catch a cunning and treacherous killer.
"Killer Pete" is a macabre freak show of crime, in which the detective story is tainted by a pervasive streak of the bizarre, that makes the story disturbing and disconcerting.
The theme of the killer automaton is reminiscent of Carr's famous "The Crooked Hinge," with which it shares an atmosphere halfway between reality and madness, although the set-up is more reminiscent of "Seeing Is Believing" due to the replacement of a harmless weapon with a far more lethal one.
The surreal setting — a medieval-style castle in the middle of Illinois — echoes the predominant feeling that accompanies the narrative: the unease typical of the uncanny valley, where everything seems so damn fake, so unnatural to the point of grotesque, and generates an anxiety steeped in alienation.
It's like being transported to a grand-guignolesque vaudeville by a madman, where pulpmixes with hard-boiled, where bizarre elements pile up dizzyingly and normality is formally banned.
A lot of misdirection, deception, and confusion that almost makes you accept a reality populated by murderous machines with lives of their own.
The initially reflective style typical of the traditional detective story of the first part soon gives way to a more lively, frenetic pace in which the case begins to reveal its many ramifications.
A perfectly oiled detective story, reminiscent of the best Carr novels, where every tiny detail is an essential part of a complex and nearly perfect criminal plan.
More complex and meticulously crafted than Cobb's automatons, there's only the clockwork plot created by Byrnside.
A perfect narrative construction that is fully evident in the revelation, which unfolds through a chain of impeccable deductions that Queen would be proud of (as would of the customary tribute provided by the "challenge to the reader").
Manory, like a bulldog, sniffs out the subtle flaws in the witnesses' accounts, following their trail until he reaches his "prey," the killer.
The resolution of certain aspects, consistent with the "engineering" nature of the crime, is technical yet understandable, like the trick behind the locked room. The true strength of "Killer Pete," however, lies in the identity of the killer and the central clue, truly subtle yet obvious, that leads to his discovery. The initial assumption is reversed: if a machine can kill, it can also lead to the truth.
Madmen Prefer Blondes (4 stars)
It's a bad time to be blonde in Chicago: a serial killer is terrorizing the city, slaughtering blonde-haired girls in its dark, foggy streets. And as a reminder of his deed, he always cuts a lock of hair from his victims.
Delbert Grady, a corrupt sergeant inclined to quicker and more effective methods than those the law allows, must nevertheless curb his violent nature under the guidance of the new mayor, the upright William Dever, and collaborate with criminal psychiatrist Ferris Brandt to stop the bloody carnage. The trail of blood (and hair), however, seems unstoppable, and desperate times call for desperate measures. Those measures are found in the names of Rowan Manory and Walter Williams, brilliant detectives all too accustomed to human squalor and baseness.
Manory will pick up the faint traces of an overly cunning killer and brings them to justice.
With "Madmen Prefer Blondes," Byrnside moves away from the traditional detective story and embraces the dynamism and adrenaline of a darkly nuanced psychological thriller.
A fast-paced, frenetic tale, permeated by the constant, nagging haze of fear and impending death.
The entire story is pervaded by the theme of doubles, which permeates the narrative structure itself: on the one hand, the procedural part, made up of routine investigations and checks; on the other, a glimpse into the mind of the alleged killer (modeled on Alexander Bonaparte Cust in "The ABC Murders") and the many suspects or victims.
The killer is double, ruthless but respectable; the suspects are double, juxtaposing a flaunted innocence with the concealment of sordid secrets.
Even the setting, a city immersed in fog, reminiscent of the splendid novel "London Particular" (the name "Brandt" pops up like an ironic reference), contributes to accentuating this ambiguity, this perfidious play of ambivalence: the fog annihilates reality, which borders on dreamlike terror, a dizzying indefiniteness that envelops events in its seductive yet perverse coils. The fog, after all, is the perfect metaphor, the embodiment of the entire case, for while it protects the victim from the killer's clutches, it is simultaneously complicit in their bloody crimes.
In short, a disturbing contrast between dazzling lights and unfathomable shadows.
The story's true strength, however, lies above all in the prose, in Byrnside's narrative skill. A mischievous prose that entices with suggestions as smoky as the fog, chimerical and fascinating. The author, like Brand, seduces with disturbing "narrative lures," as insidious as the breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretel, which only help us get inexorably lost in a forest of doubts, more chaotic than the maze of Chicago alleys.
Toward the epilogue, the thriller once again gives way to the detective story, here purely functional to identifying the killer through rational and irrefutable evidence. The whodunit, as the story progresses, becomes evident but doesn't overly disappoint, as it's clear that the story was written more for atmosphere than for the mystery itself, which is relegated to the final pages as a marginal appendix. The resolution of the locked room in the final pages is simple and elegant, a "modern" variation on one of the subgenre's oldest stratagems.
All in all, an excellent experiment in tension.
Red Snow (5 stars)
Bradley Friedman is a very popular actor in the small, stifling village of Red River. Stifling because the town seems to label every single inhabitant for life and is unwilling to tolerate any form of rebellion or change.
A bit like what happened about fifty years earlier to one of its inhabitants, Sandy Benton, a reckless girl who, after fleeing the town, returned married to the illusionist Ambrose Kellach, disliked by the townspeople because of his demonic-looking tricks. When Sandy, in the midst of a levitation experiment, fell to the ground strangled, the village didn't hesitate to beat and hang the wicked Kellach, guilty of violating divine will.
Years later, Friedman, having learned of the infamous magician's tricks, shows one of his most famous illusions, the "Fantôme Fatale," to the town's mayor, the sheriff, and two other townspeople.
Unfortunately something goes wrong and Friedman is found with his throat slit inside a pavilion in the center of a pond. The only entrance, a small wooden bridge, bears only his footprints. There is no trace left by the killer, who seems capable of levitating like a ghost.
Rowan Manory, accustomed to impossible crimes, is called to investigate the baffling case, which proves more difficult than expected.
Red River hides many secrets and is not willing to reveal them so easily. Secrets that are carried, or rather, carried, to the grave...
"Red River" is a story that unfolds with the inexorability of the most dire tragedies, a mystery immersed in the morbidly static atmosphere of a rural village where, as the investigation unfolds, a distinct sense of moral corruption pervades everything, like a disease now rooted in each of its inhabitants.
The illusionistic detective story, in the wake of Rawson, gradually transforms into a suffocating "cold case," involving the entire community of Red River, with its idiosyncrasies, its distorted moral and religious views.
The origins of the present crimes are rooted in a dark past, suffocated by a thick cloud of silence and unyielding prejudice.
Byrnside is very skilled at constructing a narrow, almost detached setting from the rest of the world, still governed by bygone norms steeped in superstition, perfectly represented by the austere and bigoted parish priest Maddux, a sort of doctrinal stand-in for Monsignor Wicks in "Wake Up Dead Man."
The tragic, sad and anguished atmosphere seems to affect Rowan himself, who appears more sympathetic to the suffering inherent in the truth of the case.
The two impossible crimes are solved with wit, exploiting an original and interesting principle.
Perhaps the deductions in the story are less compelling than Byrnside has usually accustomed us to, but the paradoxically almost fatalistic surprise of the "who" and the "why," which reaches the pinnacle of tragic and devastating pathos, is very well constructed and impactful.
The Carny Murders (5 stars)
The Hargrove Carnival features a wide variety of freaks: from ventriloquist Leonard Pike with his cynical wooden puppet Marlow, to Shirley, the tattooed woman, from the classic bearded lady Bernice, and the strongman Nap. However, the often over-the-top, light-hearted atmosphere of the various shows is marred by a series of disturbing disappearances: three women have vanished without even taking their loved possessions. While Raymond Hargrove, the company's greedy owner, tries to understand what's happening there, Frankie Lee, an old ventriloquist jailed for robbery, returns to visit his old companions, flaunting his (not very legitimate) wealth to the four winds.
Money can buy everything, but apparently not salvation: Frankie will be found savagely murdered, his face cruelly disfigured.
A killer lurks among the company's tents and trailers... and he's more ruthless and insane than one might think.
"The Carny Murders" is the real surprise of this collection, the narrative outsider with which Byrnside, in this collection, presents crime in a new, gruesome form, that of the splatter-horror.
The carnival setting, teeming with bizarre, grotesque characters, seemingly out of an absurd world, immediately plunges the reader into a reality where everything is distorted, both literally and metaphorically.
In the sick world of the "carnival," normal logic cannot prevail, and madness seems to completely dominate the scene, moving at ease among the various freak shows.
The terror arrives gradually; at first it's just a background noise with the news of the disappearance of three girls; but gradually it gets closer and closer, with the unnerving and inexorable slowness of oblivion.
The story veers toward splatter, with bloody, perverse and gore murders, in the style of contemporary Japanese detective stories.
The characters, whose sordid, often ambiguous personalities we understand thanks to dizzying and skillful shifts in perspective, tell stories of marginalization and self-perpetuating degradation that culminates in crime and madness.
The superb resolution, with an unexpected and diabolical twist that shifts perspectives, perfectly seals the macabre aura that distinguishes this story. Pure horror manages to become a detective story, the macabre and supernatural transform into a harsh, unnatural, yet damnable surprising logic.
"The Architecture of Murder" is his second collection of short stories. The title itself encapsulates the stylistic signature that characterizes the four stories in the book: the meticulous composition of plots and puzzles, in which nothing is left to chance, in which every single element is an integral part of an elaborate and precise criminal framework.
"The Architecture of Murder," while renewing the author's trademarks (the untarnished duo of Rowan Manory and Walter Williams; the degraded and corrupt urban setting where any kind of salvation seems impossible, where crime appears an inevitable fate; the impossible crimes typical of the British school of mystery; the harsh language, à la Sam Spade, combined with an irreverent and cynical irony; detestable yet engaging suspects), marks a clear evolution in his literary output.
In addition to greater characterization of the characters, who, despite their moral narrowness, acquire a depth that makes them more complex and alive, starting with a less imperturbable Rowan Manory, more involved in the cases he faces, there's a greater thematic and stylistic heterogeneity.
This is perhaps Byrnside's most experimental work, opening him up to new influences and exploring new genres without diminishing his deep passion for the deductive and logical detective story: he goes from the claustrophobic thriller ("Madmen Prefer Blondes") to the bloody and alienating horror ("The Carny Murders").
Byrnside demonstrates his versatility, leaving his unmistakable mark on a collection that isn't boring; on the contrary, it captivates and leads the readers to discover the many obsessive nuances of the (almost) perfect crime.
Killer Pete (5 stars)
Take a misanthropic inventor living in a castle in the middle of Illinois, a cowboy automaton capable of firing a shot from his revolver while mocking you, a rather irate business partner, a less-than-faithful lover, a less-than-loving son... what could go wrong?
Everything.
The wealthy and reclusive Horace Cobb is found dead inside his locked laboratory, killed by a gunshot apparently fired by his automaton, the evil Killer Pete.
The case is strange enough to require the intervention of the tough and brilliant Rowan Manory, assisted by the trusty Walter Williams.
A locked room, a phonograph that captured the deceased's last moments, a room full of strange contraptions, and a key taped to the floor... Manory finds himself in a bind as he must investigate thoroughly to catch a cunning and treacherous killer.
"Killer Pete" is a macabre freak show of crime, in which the detective story is tainted by a pervasive streak of the bizarre, that makes the story disturbing and disconcerting.
The theme of the killer automaton is reminiscent of Carr's famous "The Crooked Hinge," with which it shares an atmosphere halfway between reality and madness, although the set-up is more reminiscent of "Seeing Is Believing" due to the replacement of a harmless weapon with a far more lethal one.
The surreal setting — a medieval-style castle in the middle of Illinois — echoes the predominant feeling that accompanies the narrative: the unease typical of the uncanny valley, where everything seems so damn fake, so unnatural to the point of grotesque, and generates an anxiety steeped in alienation.
It's like being transported to a grand-guignolesque vaudeville by a madman, where pulpmixes with hard-boiled, where bizarre elements pile up dizzyingly and normality is formally banned.
A lot of misdirection, deception, and confusion that almost makes you accept a reality populated by murderous machines with lives of their own.
The initially reflective style typical of the traditional detective story of the first part soon gives way to a more lively, frenetic pace in which the case begins to reveal its many ramifications.
A perfectly oiled detective story, reminiscent of the best Carr novels, where every tiny detail is an essential part of a complex and nearly perfect criminal plan.
More complex and meticulously crafted than Cobb's automatons, there's only the clockwork plot created by Byrnside.
A perfect narrative construction that is fully evident in the revelation, which unfolds through a chain of impeccable deductions that Queen would be proud of (as would of the customary tribute provided by the "challenge to the reader").
Manory, like a bulldog, sniffs out the subtle flaws in the witnesses' accounts, following their trail until he reaches his "prey," the killer.
The resolution of certain aspects, consistent with the "engineering" nature of the crime, is technical yet understandable, like the trick behind the locked room. The true strength of "Killer Pete," however, lies in the identity of the killer and the central clue, truly subtle yet obvious, that leads to his discovery. The initial assumption is reversed: if a machine can kill, it can also lead to the truth.
Madmen Prefer Blondes (4 stars)
It's a bad time to be blonde in Chicago: a serial killer is terrorizing the city, slaughtering blonde-haired girls in its dark, foggy streets. And as a reminder of his deed, he always cuts a lock of hair from his victims.
Delbert Grady, a corrupt sergeant inclined to quicker and more effective methods than those the law allows, must nevertheless curb his violent nature under the guidance of the new mayor, the upright William Dever, and collaborate with criminal psychiatrist Ferris Brandt to stop the bloody carnage. The trail of blood (and hair), however, seems unstoppable, and desperate times call for desperate measures. Those measures are found in the names of Rowan Manory and Walter Williams, brilliant detectives all too accustomed to human squalor and baseness.
Manory will pick up the faint traces of an overly cunning killer and brings them to justice.
With "Madmen Prefer Blondes," Byrnside moves away from the traditional detective story and embraces the dynamism and adrenaline of a darkly nuanced psychological thriller.
A fast-paced, frenetic tale, permeated by the constant, nagging haze of fear and impending death.
The entire story is pervaded by the theme of doubles, which permeates the narrative structure itself: on the one hand, the procedural part, made up of routine investigations and checks; on the other, a glimpse into the mind of the alleged killer (modeled on Alexander Bonaparte Cust in "The ABC Murders") and the many suspects or victims.
The killer is double, ruthless but respectable; the suspects are double, juxtaposing a flaunted innocence with the concealment of sordid secrets.
Even the setting, a city immersed in fog, reminiscent of the splendid novel "London Particular" (the name "Brandt" pops up like an ironic reference), contributes to accentuating this ambiguity, this perfidious play of ambivalence: the fog annihilates reality, which borders on dreamlike terror, a dizzying indefiniteness that envelops events in its seductive yet perverse coils. The fog, after all, is the perfect metaphor, the embodiment of the entire case, for while it protects the victim from the killer's clutches, it is simultaneously complicit in their bloody crimes.
In short, a disturbing contrast between dazzling lights and unfathomable shadows.
The story's true strength, however, lies above all in the prose, in Byrnside's narrative skill. A mischievous prose that entices with suggestions as smoky as the fog, chimerical and fascinating. The author, like Brand, seduces with disturbing "narrative lures," as insidious as the breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretel, which only help us get inexorably lost in a forest of doubts, more chaotic than the maze of Chicago alleys.
Toward the epilogue, the thriller once again gives way to the detective story, here purely functional to identifying the killer through rational and irrefutable evidence. The whodunit, as the story progresses, becomes evident but doesn't overly disappoint, as it's clear that the story was written more for atmosphere than for the mystery itself, which is relegated to the final pages as a marginal appendix. The resolution of the locked room in the final pages is simple and elegant, a "modern" variation on one of the subgenre's oldest stratagems.
All in all, an excellent experiment in tension.
Red Snow (5 stars)
Bradley Friedman is a very popular actor in the small, stifling village of Red River. Stifling because the town seems to label every single inhabitant for life and is unwilling to tolerate any form of rebellion or change.
A bit like what happened about fifty years earlier to one of its inhabitants, Sandy Benton, a reckless girl who, after fleeing the town, returned married to the illusionist Ambrose Kellach, disliked by the townspeople because of his demonic-looking tricks. When Sandy, in the midst of a levitation experiment, fell to the ground strangled, the village didn't hesitate to beat and hang the wicked Kellach, guilty of violating divine will.
Years later, Friedman, having learned of the infamous magician's tricks, shows one of his most famous illusions, the "Fantôme Fatale," to the town's mayor, the sheriff, and two other townspeople.
Unfortunately something goes wrong and Friedman is found with his throat slit inside a pavilion in the center of a pond. The only entrance, a small wooden bridge, bears only his footprints. There is no trace left by the killer, who seems capable of levitating like a ghost.
Rowan Manory, accustomed to impossible crimes, is called to investigate the baffling case, which proves more difficult than expected.
Red River hides many secrets and is not willing to reveal them so easily. Secrets that are carried, or rather, carried, to the grave...
"Red River" is a story that unfolds with the inexorability of the most dire tragedies, a mystery immersed in the morbidly static atmosphere of a rural village where, as the investigation unfolds, a distinct sense of moral corruption pervades everything, like a disease now rooted in each of its inhabitants.
The illusionistic detective story, in the wake of Rawson, gradually transforms into a suffocating "cold case," involving the entire community of Red River, with its idiosyncrasies, its distorted moral and religious views.
The origins of the present crimes are rooted in a dark past, suffocated by a thick cloud of silence and unyielding prejudice.
Byrnside is very skilled at constructing a narrow, almost detached setting from the rest of the world, still governed by bygone norms steeped in superstition, perfectly represented by the austere and bigoted parish priest Maddux, a sort of doctrinal stand-in for Monsignor Wicks in "Wake Up Dead Man."
The tragic, sad and anguished atmosphere seems to affect Rowan himself, who appears more sympathetic to the suffering inherent in the truth of the case.
The two impossible crimes are solved with wit, exploiting an original and interesting principle.
Perhaps the deductions in the story are less compelling than Byrnside has usually accustomed us to, but the paradoxically almost fatalistic surprise of the "who" and the "why," which reaches the pinnacle of tragic and devastating pathos, is very well constructed and impactful.
The Carny Murders (5 stars)
The Hargrove Carnival features a wide variety of freaks: from ventriloquist Leonard Pike with his cynical wooden puppet Marlow, to Shirley, the tattooed woman, from the classic bearded lady Bernice, and the strongman Nap. However, the often over-the-top, light-hearted atmosphere of the various shows is marred by a series of disturbing disappearances: three women have vanished without even taking their loved possessions. While Raymond Hargrove, the company's greedy owner, tries to understand what's happening there, Frankie Lee, an old ventriloquist jailed for robbery, returns to visit his old companions, flaunting his (not very legitimate) wealth to the four winds.
Money can buy everything, but apparently not salvation: Frankie will be found savagely murdered, his face cruelly disfigured.
A killer lurks among the company's tents and trailers... and he's more ruthless and insane than one might think.
"The Carny Murders" is the real surprise of this collection, the narrative outsider with which Byrnside, in this collection, presents crime in a new, gruesome form, that of the splatter-horror.
The carnival setting, teeming with bizarre, grotesque characters, seemingly out of an absurd world, immediately plunges the reader into a reality where everything is distorted, both literally and metaphorically.
In the sick world of the "carnival," normal logic cannot prevail, and madness seems to completely dominate the scene, moving at ease among the various freak shows.
The terror arrives gradually; at first it's just a background noise with the news of the disappearance of three girls; but gradually it gets closer and closer, with the unnerving and inexorable slowness of oblivion.
The story veers toward splatter, with bloody, perverse and gore murders, in the style of contemporary Japanese detective stories.
The characters, whose sordid, often ambiguous personalities we understand thanks to dizzying and skillful shifts in perspective, tell stories of marginalization and self-perpetuating degradation that culminates in crime and madness.
The superb resolution, with an unexpected and diabolical twist that shifts perspectives, perfectly seals the macabre aura that distinguishes this story. Pure horror manages to become a detective story, the macabre and supernatural transform into a harsh, unnatural, yet damnable surprising logic.
April 24, 2026
After enjoying Byrnside's previous collection of shorts, I was excited for this one. Unfortunately, I came away a little disappointed.
For starters, to call these short stories felt misleading. Both "It's About Impossible Crime" and "The Architecture of Murder" are around 300 pages, but the former has one additional story which helps the pacing. You might not think that ~10 pages more per story would add up, but it certainly does. Many felt closer to almost-a-novella than short-story. Additionally, the previous collection all followed Byrnside's main detective, Manory. One of the aspects I liked the most in his previous work was some character development for Manory and Walter. In this collection, however, Manory and Walter could be substituted for just about any other detective pair and not much would change. The extra pages focus on exposition for the individual stories themselves, which is fine. But because a lot of work is done to make these stories feel like they're self-contained, I almost wish that Manory didn't appear in any of them, instead allowing them to reach their own endings as in the final story, The Carny Murders.
In terms of personal enjoyment, my rankings go:
Red River > The Carny Murders > Killer Pete > Madmen Prefer Blondes
That being said, I thought that the "twists" for TCM and MPB were very obvious. Red River had a very nice take on a Footprint story. I'm also a sucker for the small-town aspect of it. The premise almost sounds like it belongs in a rural Japanese village, yet Byrnside manages to maintain a unique voice that gives the story a firm American edge.
Additionally, I must take some points off for some errors in the Kindle version. In Red River it was very noticeable that certain portions of the text ended up being different sizes, which was very jarring and distracting. I also think there was a mistake on page 253, or if the identity reveal was intentional, the narrative made it feel like this was an accident.
For starters, to call these short stories felt misleading. Both "It's About Impossible Crime" and "The Architecture of Murder" are around 300 pages, but the former has one additional story which helps the pacing. You might not think that ~10 pages more per story would add up, but it certainly does. Many felt closer to almost-a-novella than short-story. Additionally, the previous collection all followed Byrnside's main detective, Manory. One of the aspects I liked the most in his previous work was some character development for Manory and Walter. In this collection, however, Manory and Walter could be substituted for just about any other detective pair and not much would change. The extra pages focus on exposition for the individual stories themselves, which is fine. But because a lot of work is done to make these stories feel like they're self-contained, I almost wish that Manory didn't appear in any of them, instead allowing them to reach their own endings as in the final story, The Carny Murders.
In terms of personal enjoyment, my rankings go:
Red River > The Carny Murders > Killer Pete > Madmen Prefer Blondes
That being said, I thought that the "twists" for TCM and MPB were very obvious. Red River had a very nice take on a Footprint story. I'm also a sucker for the small-town aspect of it. The premise almost sounds like it belongs in a rural Japanese village, yet Byrnside manages to maintain a unique voice that gives the story a firm American edge.
Additionally, I must take some points off for some errors in the Kindle version. In Red River it was very noticeable that certain portions of the text ended up being different sizes, which was very jarring and distracting. I also think there was a mistake on page 253, or if the identity reveal was intentional, the narrative made it feel like this was an accident.
July 19, 2026
Wasn't really that impressed with any of the mysteries this time around, but the atmosphere of most of them was pretty cool. First collection much better in every way.
A ranking:
4 > 1 > 3 > 2
Also the diagrams in this one are AI, which is a bit silly because apart from having incredible mistakes on them (calling a bridge a door) they're also contradictory with each other.
A ranking:
4 > 1 > 3 > 2
Also the diagrams in this one are AI, which is a bit silly because apart from having incredible mistakes on them (calling a bridge a door) they're also contradictory with each other.
September 4, 2026
Killer Pete: 4/5
Madmen Prefer Blondes: 2/5
Red River: 3/5
The Carny Murders: 4/5
Madmen Prefer Blondes: 2/5
Red River: 3/5
The Carny Murders: 4/5
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews