Runner Up? Its a Winner to Me ...

She'd been strangled with a rosary-not a run-of-the-mill rosary like you might get at a Catholic bookstore where Hail Marys are two for a quarter and indulgences are included on the back flap of the May issue of "Nuns and Roses" magazine, but a fancy heirloom rosary with pearls, rubies, and a solid gold cross, a rosary with attitude, the kind of rosary that said, "Get your Jehovah's Witness butt off my front porch."

Mark Schweizer, Hopkinsville, KY

The runner up in the Detective category of 2007 entries in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. See all the winners here.

For those not in the know, the contest is an "international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. ... Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that Charles Schulz' beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, 'It was a dark and stormy night.'"