This year’s worth of the most powerful, the most startling, the smartest and most astute, in short, the best crime journalism. Scouring hundreds of publications,Otto PenzlerandThomas H. Cookhave created a remarkable compilation containing the best examples of the most current and vibrant of our literary traditions: crime reporting.Included in this volume areMaximillian Potter’s“The Body Farm” from GQ, a portrait of Murray Marks, who collects dead bodies and strews them around two acres of the University of Tennessee campus to study their decomposition in order to help solve crime;Jay Kirk’s“My Undertaker, My Pimp,” from Harper’s, in which Mack Moore and his wife, Angel, switch from running crooked funeral parlors to establishing a brothel;Skip Hollandsworth’s“The Day Treva Throneberry Disappeared” from Texas Monthly, about the sudden disappearance of a teenager and the strange place she turned up;Lawrence Wright’s“The Counterterrorist” from The New Yorker, the story of John O’Neill, the FBI agent who tracked Osama bin Laden for a decade—until he was killed when the World Trade Center collapsed.Intriguing, entertaining, and compelling reading,Best American Crime Writinghas established itself as a much-anticipated annual.