Sound impossible? Not if that author is Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Rusch made a name for herself as the co-founder of Pulphouse Publishing, a publisher of science fiction and mystery stories. Thus, her love of both those genres began early in her career. Later she became the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, recognized as one of the top genre magazines. During her tenure there she won the coveted Hugo Award for Best Editor.

In 1999, Rusch pulled off the genre equivalent of winning the Triple Crown, when three different stories she wrote were independently judged as Reader's Choice Winners in three different major fiction magazines. Her mystery story "Details" won the Reader's Choice Award for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine that year. Her story "Echea" was nominated for practically every major award (Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus) and won the Homer award as well as being voted the Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine Reader's Choice award winner. And, in the same year, she won the Science Fiction Age Magazine Reader's Choice Award. No other writer has ever achieved three major magazine Reader's Choice awards for different stories in different publications in the same year.

It's all in the Details
Of these great stories, I'd like to recommend "Details." It starts out as a classically constructed mystery tale but ends up being far more. In it, a GI returning from the battlefields of WWII Europe comes home to find himself embroiled in a murder investigation. The story is told as a flashback in which the now 77 year-old former GI finds his health failing and decides to write down some of the "details" from his life before it's too late.

We soon find ourselves going back in time forty-five years or so. We find the main character driving into his dusty town, not feeling much like a war hero. He stops at a gas station and buys a Coke from a machine. "The small old fashioned bottles," we're told. Suddenly, a beautiful woman walks over to him and asks him for a drink, and he obliges. That seems innocent enough, and indeed we find that this story is a textbook example of the "innocent bystander" form of mystery story. Well, as you probably have already guessed, this lady turns up quite dead the next day, and our GI is the prime suspect.