1st May 2026. I spotted on Clarkesworld’s BlueSky feed that Tia Tashiro’s ‘The Temporary Murder of Thomas Monroe’ from Clarkesworld Magazine #220 January 2025, won the 2026 Derringer Award for Best Novelette, so thought I’d read it. You can read it yourself, or listen to it here. It’s a clever story from an author new to me, and I was in the mind for clever crime fiction, as I’d just read Patricia Highsmith’s ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ (which I wish I’d read before watching the recent TV series). Anyhoo, as you might guess from the title of this story, Thomas Monroe is brought back from the dead, on account of him being from a very wealthy family who can afford that sort of thing (and who really don’t understand him and want him to get an implant to control his emotional mood swings, which he really doesn’t want). We know who killed him, but not way, from an opening section of the story. And as Thomas’ hasn’t had a backup for two months, any memories he may get back from the murder are subject to the success of nanobots beavering away in his brain.
As he starts to remember, we find out exackerly what had happened, and there’s a twist or two, as you want from a crime story. So all in all, a neat little story.