Review: Four short stories with well-composed details, suspense, and surprise endings
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 24, 2013
Stephen Leather has composed quite a few books and short stories. All are good, some are superb. Leather is good at giving interesting somewhat humorous details, filing his stories with suspense, and snapping readers to attention with surprise endings.Breaking in - Grout is a house burglar who assures readers that he is quite adept at his trade. He tells us that he knows all the tricks and has all the proper implements and has never been caught for robbing. However, this time he stumbles into a house where two men are standing who have just killed the home owner. What is going on? Who are these men? What are they up to? Why did they kill the man? Will they kill Grout?Stranger on a Train - Four youths board a train to rob it during the two minutes between two stations. Their method is to scare all the passengers. But one man is not frightened. Who is he and what does he do? And how do the passengers react?Inspector Zhang and the Hotel Guest - Zhang, a Singapore inspector appears in quite a few Leather tales. Here he comes across a man who tells him he lost his memory. The man is in the room of a woman who rented the room for a single night. The man says he has been robbed. Zhang uses Sherlock Holmes type of deductions to discover who the man is, why he is in the room, and what happened.Cat's Eyes - A man picks up a prostitute in a bar and she tells him the story of her life, a story that disturbs him.Amazon charges nothing for this book. It is worth much more.