The Deadly Bride and 21 of the Year's Finest Crime and Mystery Stories Book

Couldn't get through it. Started at random in the middle, by chance hitting upon the story for which the collection is named. It was pretty bad. Next, was a story by J. A. Jance where the author poured 99.999% of her energy into lovingly describing her dogs, and whatever was left over grudingly went towards sketching out a bland, suspenseless, utterly lackluster mystery. After that, a story by F. Paul Wilson that was so blatantly and dishearteningly racist within just the first page that I was like, "You know, I think I'm done with this book." The story opens with some classic 'I've literally never spoken to a black person in my life, but this is how I think they talk' dialogue, which, ok, MAYBE he is just terrible at writing dialogue, it could happen. But then he goes on to describe the woman as having "Chia Pet hair" and looking like a "brown manatee in a muumuu". I just... I want to let that sit for a moment.
Because I am a curious person even when I know I'll regret it, I flipped through the rest of the story, which is basically about this white off-duty cop going into a drugstore that is then held up by a group of bad guys straight out of Racist Stereotypes Central Casting. Everything goes about as you would expect, if you were expecting it to go nowhere good, with a slight twist at the end, in which one of the bad guys, "the Ecuadorian" (who we find is named "Pepe"), gets beaten to death with a tub of ice cream by the woman ("brown manatee") from the beginning.

I just.

I know it's generally not fair to judge an entire anthology by 3 stories, but in this case, I feel like the inclusion of the Wilson story ALONE calls the editors' judgment into question in a major fucking way. Maybe there are some gems hidden in this godforsaken tome, but alas, I'll never know it. I almost don't want to return it to the library, because there's just no warning! People know what they're getting into with Huck Finn or whatever, but this? An anthology claiming to be the finest stories from 2005? JEEZ.