DOLPHIN JUNCTION

Herron brings his unexcelled skill for jaw-dropping twists to 11 short stories originally published between 2006 and 2019.

Even the most conventional of these tales, the four stories starring private inquiry agent Zoë Boehm and sometimes her husband and partner, Joe Silvermann, are filled with delicious surprises. In "Mirror Images," a successful author hires the couple to exorcise the late boathouse owner who keeps popping up to remind him that he got an unimportant detail wrong. Joe's hired to deliver a blackmail payment for a wayward wife’s porn video in “Proof of Love" and to rid his client of a stalker in “The Other Half.” Widowed, Zoë turns briefly and hilariously to psychotherapy in “What We Do.” The other seven stories more consistently showcase Herron’s gift for aha revelations that don’t just identify the culprit, but indicate that you’ve been looking at everything backward. A cuckold undertakes murderous vengeance in “Remote Control.” A couple blithely indulge in idle deductions about a stranger as a kidnapped woman lies in a car trunk outside their rest stop in “Lost Luggage.” In the title story, an abandoned husband insists in vain that his wife never would have signed her goodbye note with a nickname she detested. The uncharacteristically bright “The Usual Santas” recounts the attempts of eight department-store Santas to deal with the imposter who’s infiltrated their ranks. Even lesser efforts “An American Fridge” and “The Last Dead Letter” catch you looking the wrong way. And in “All the Livelong Day,” in some ways the most predictable of all these stories, a couple’s hike turns into an authentic nightmare.

Perfect for readers eager to have the wool pulled over their eyes again and again.