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-Cody 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.

Stories included in this collection:
Famous Blue Raincoat
Black Sheep
The Moving Coffin
Anna and the Snake People
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