The Best American Mystery Stories 2

American Mystery 2 brings together a selection of crime and mystery short stories compiled from material published in various magazines in the United States in 2001. These are twenty very different stories, but together they form a panorama of the current state of American crime fiction.

Masters like Russell Banks and Joyce Carol Oates are mixed with newcomers such as Jennifer Anderson, John Salter, and Roxana Robinson. The second volume in the American Mystery series, the book has a peculiarity – many of the genre's most familiar names are not present in this collection. This is either because they stopped writing short stories or because some of these new voices simply produced superior work.

Most of the stories are crime or suspense stories – stories of characters and motivation – rather than detective stories.