The Deadliest Games: Tales of Psychological Suspense from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

Subtitled ``Tales of Psychological Suspense from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine ,'' this enjoyable, if unexceptional, collection leads off with Joyce Carol Oates's chilling ``The Model.'' There a sense of dread gradually develops as 17-year-old Sybil Blake, an orphan who has been told that her parents drowned when she was two years old, allows a polite, scarred man to sketch her and learns the truth of events in her childhood. In June Thomson's ``Secrets,'' Edward Wilson, a ``fat lump of a child'' comes to stay in wartime Cornwall with the narrator and his sister Naomi who, while playing with Edward near the Cornish cliffs, gives him an ointment that will help him to fly. In Tom Verde's ``The Big Dance,'' set in Malawi, the white murderer of a black prostitute is acquitted in court for lack of evidence but is brought to justice in a dreadful way by a native cult whose members dance in animal costumes. Edward D. Hoch, Robert Campbell, Florence V. Mayberry and Martin Naparsteck are among the other contributors. (Dec.)