"Gorman is great; possibly one of THE greats," writes the British mystery journal Shots about Ed Gorman's short stories. "If George Orwell had written thrillers," Shots continues, "he might have written them this way; never a word too many, never a word too few, never a word that doesn't come from the heart."

Ed Gorman's mystery short stories have a flavor found nowhere else among contemporary writers. His tales have an amazing breadth of style and plot—classical detection, private eye stories, biter-bit tales in which criminous schemes turn back on the perpetrator, and straight crime stories.

What they all have in common is a recognition that we cannot escape our past. The Judge Whitney-Sam McCain stories are filled with the sights and sounds of small-town America around 1958. "The Closing Circle" is both a detective story and a sensitive evocation of a girl coming of age. "The Cage" and "Favor and the Princess" are not only pure detection but also about understanding your first love years later.

You may like some of the protagonists, such as private eye Jack Dwyer in "Eye of the Beholder," and despise others, including the narrator in "Our Kind of Guy," but all of Ed Gorman's stories are filled with the truth of human experience.

Contents:

• Introduction
• Famous Blue Raincoat
• Black Sheep
• The Moving Coffin
• Anna and the Snake People [Anna Tolan]
• Favor and the Princess
• The Christmas Kitten
• Wake Up, Little Suzie
• The Closing Circle
• The Long Way Back
• The Cage
• Our Kind of Guy
• Eye of the Beholder [Jack Dwyer]