Quick Take
- Narration: Dan John Miller navigates the tonal range of a multi-author anthology with impressive control, adapting his approach to each story’s atmosphere without ever feeling inconsistent.
- Themes: Crime and moral ambiguity, genre reinvention, the short fiction form at its pressure-tested best
- Mood: Varied and propulsive, rewarding and occasionally uneven
- Verdict: An uncommonly well-assembled annual collection that earns its listen across nearly seventeen hours by consistently finding stories that surprise rather than confirm.
There is a particular listening pleasure in short fiction anthologies that novel-length audiobooks simply cannot replicate: the sense of arrival and departure, the way a world opens up and closes within an hour, the fact that if a story does not catch you, the next one begins before you have properly formed a complaint. I worked through most of The Best American Mystery Stories 2020 during a week of long commutes, and by the time I reached the final entries I had developed strong opinions about which of C.J. Box’s selections had earned their place and which had not. That kind of active engagement with a collection is exactly what good anthologies produce.
Box brings the sensibility of a writer known for his Joe Pickett outdoor crime series to the task of guest editor, which means the 2020 collection skews toward stories with clear moral stakes, strong genre technique, and atmosphere that earns its place in the prose. He is not interested in experimentation for its own sake, but neither does he retreat into safe whodunit territory. The range across this collection is genuinely wider than his own fiction might suggest: psychological noir sits next to rural crime sits next to suburban menace sits next to stories that use the mystery form as a delivery mechanism for something that is really about class or grief or the ordinary violence of family.
Dan John Miller and the Problem of Seventeen Hours
A seventeen-hour anthology places extraordinary demands on a narrator. Dan John Miller’s performance across these stories is the element that makes the listening experience coherent rather than merely sequential. He adjusts register between stories with the ease of a skilled actor moving between roles, and his ability to hold a tense scene’s atmosphere without overacting is exactly the right tool for crime fiction, a genre where narrators who push too hard tip the material into parody.
Some stories benefit from his work more than others. The reviewers who singled out “The Last Hit” about an aging hitman as a highlight are responding in part to what Miller does with the character’s voice: there is a flatness to it that is doing heavy emotional lifting. “The Girl with the Ax” is another standout, the kind of first-sentence lock-in that an anthology editor lives for, and Miller trusts the writing enough to let the opening do its work without embellishment.
Where Box’s Selection Choices Pay Off and Where They Do Not
Any annual “Best of” collection argues implicitly that the selections justify a superlative. Box makes credible choices more often than not, but the collection is inevitably uneven. One reviewer described a story called “Pretzel Logic” as a confusing miss, and I think that assessment is fair: the plot mechanics there work against the story’s atmosphere in ways that a page reader might navigate more easily than a listener who cannot scroll back to recheck a detail.
But the hits land solidly. “Whatever Happened to Lorna Winters” generates atmosphere through character consistency in a way that rewards the attention the audio format demands. The mafia-adjacent stories benefit from Miller’s control of masculine register without any of the tired inflection patterns that audiobook crime fiction sometimes falls into. And the variety across sixteen-plus hours means that even if three or four stories do not work for you individually, you are never more than thirty minutes from something that does.
Who Gets the Most From This Collection
This is an audiobook that rewards existing mystery readers who want exposure to writers outside their usual rotation. The collection introduced multiple reviewers to short fiction authors they then actively pursued beyond the anthology, which is the highest compliment a “Best of” can receive. If you prefer your crime fiction at novel length, with room for the kind of character development a short story cannot support, the format may frustrate you regardless of Miller’s skilled execution. But if you have any tolerance for the compressed emotional arc of crime short fiction, Box and Miller have assembled something worth the seventeen hours.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many stories are in The Best American Mystery Stories 2020, and how long is each one?
The total runtime is just under seventeen hours across a collection of roughly twenty stories, meaning most individual pieces run between thirty minutes and an hour. The length varies by story, which makes this well-suited to commute listening.
Does C.J. Box’s editorial selection reflect his own fiction style, or is the collection more diverse?
Box’s sensibility is present but not limiting. The collection has clear atmosphere and genre technique as throughlines, but the range of subgenre, setting, and tone is wider than his Joe Pickett novels would suggest. He includes psychological stories alongside more traditional crime plots.
Is the audio format a disadvantage for this anthology compared to reading it in print?
For most stories, no. A few plot-mechanic-heavy entries are slightly harder to follow without the ability to recheck details, but Dan John Miller’s narration compensates with strong atmospheric control. The format suits the bite-size structure well.
Are the stories in the 2020 collection all published in 2020, or does the selection reach back further?
The Best American series traditionally selects from work published in the preceding calendar year, meaning these stories appeared in 2019 publications and were selected for the 2020 edition. Some were published in literary magazines, others in genre collections.
