Sara Paretsky, John D. MacDonald, Nancy Pickard and Barbara Michaels are among those represented in Women on the Edge, a collection of fourteen classic tales by modern masters of the short-form mystery. Their common theme: women who have been pushed to the limit of physical, mental or emotional endurance. Some of the women in these stories, like Sara Paretsky's Chicago private detective V. I. Warshawsky, who investigates a murder in "The Case of the Pietro Andromache," live in sophisticated big cities. Others, like the woman in Nancy Pickard's "Afraid All the Time," seek the deceptive peace of country life. Sometimes it is the woman who is the menace, as in "A Crime of Passion" by Richard T. Chizmar, in which a writer's violent and erotic work has made him the target of a fanatical anti-pornography group led by a beautiful but obsessed woman. Others are young and vulnerable, like the teenage runaways who encounter a mysterious young man in an abandoned farmhouse in Barbara Michael's "The Runaway." Blood plays a major part in "Seeing Red" by Barbara Collins in which a hot-tempered young attorney in the throes of P.M.S. clashes with an insurance salesman in a mid-life crisis. Then there are John D. MacDonald's feisty war widow in "Betrayed"; a suburban mother who tangles with a hit man in Howard Browne's "House Call"; a runaway wife sought by Loren D. Estleman's hard boiled private eye Amos Walker in "I'm in the Book"; and a world-weary beauty who exorcises twenty-five-year-old demons at her high school reunion in Ed Gorman's "The Reason Why." There are still more women on the edge in stories by Bill Pronzini, Wayne D. Dundee, Bill Crider, Max Allan Collins and Marcia Muller.

Contents:

• The Case of the Pietro Andromache by Sara Paretsky
• Betrayed by John D. MacDonald
• House Call by Howard Browne
• The Runaway by Barbara Michaels
• I’m in the Book by Loren D. Estleman
• The Reason Why by Ed Gorman
• Seeing Red by Barbara Collins
• Black Wind by Bill Pronzini
• Death’s Brother by Bill Crider
• Marble Mildred by Max Allan Collins
• Afraid All the Time by Nancy Pickard
• Body Count by Wayne D. Dundee
• A Crime of Passion by Richard T. Chizmar
• Deceptions by Marcia Muller