Review: A lot of Great Stories, Poor Formatting Lets By Hook or By Crook Down Though
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 7, 2014
Usually when you buy a collection of short stories, there's a contents page and you can easily choose and navigate the Kindle to whichever story you want to read next.  Not so with By Hook or By Crook that you can only move through by flicking your finger and turning the electronic pages.  You can also get this as a physical book, I'd recommend that to the Kindle edition.By Hook or By Crook has a fair number of stories by established big name authors and ones you've maybe never heard of.  They all revolve around crime of some sort, some set in the modern day, some in era or typewriters and PI's with hats and trench coats.  Some are brilliant reads, some you'll end up skipping about half way through.  My favourites were Crazy Larry Smells Bacon by Greg Bardsley, where a young boy learns not to just believe the labels his parents put on others. Blood Sacrifices and the Catatonic Kid by Tom Piccirilli about a mental home resident who witnesses a kid attack an abusive orderly then is dragged along on his escape.  Amapola by Luis Urrea about a kid whose best friend is a drug cartel figure's son.  He falls in love with his friend's sister which the family don't seem to mind as they think he's gay, when they find out he isn't, well that's the fun of the story.  The Tell Tale Pure (I wonder if this is a typo and it's supposed to be Purr, as there's a few fair typos in this collection), by Mary Higgins Clark about a grandson who wants the inheritance of his grandmother who just isn't dying fast enough is also a good one.If the book was formatted properly rather than a just start at page one, flick the pages with your finger until the last page of the last story I would rate it four stars.