Highway Thirteen

Collections of short stories are not often an easy sell, but "Highway Thirteen", winner of The Story Prize in 2025 is very cohesive. No character appears in more than one story, but they are all centered around a string of murders. The murderer himself is mentioned frequently, but he never appears - which is a smart way to center the collection around the characters who suffer in one way or another from his choices without giving him a personality or even a redemption. One of the blurbs says that Fiona McFarlane enters her stories at just the right time, and that is true time and again. Sure, not all stories are equally exciting - I like the story about the murderer's neighbor or the one about a woman who is empathetic to a fault better than others, but McFarlane shows a wide range of characters, settings, situations, points of view and subgenres, and I am really looking forward to reading something else by her.