I like Katherine Rusch’s retrieval artist novels and stories so I picked this up for my Kindle. After the first one, Discovery, about an attorney who takes a case related to the death in a train wreck of her client’s husband I almost quit;It was banal and unbelievable. but I’m glad I continued because the second story in the collection, “Cowboy Grace”, was excellent. Grace goes through a midlife crisis after feeling deserted by her friends who don’t understand the trauma of her breast biopsy. She sells her accounting business, drives west and finally decides to settle in Reno where she changes her name, gets a job as a poker dealer, and has settled into a very nice, comfortable life until a skip tracer shows up and accuses her of embezzlement from her former firm. Excellent story.

The other stories are equally intriguing if varying in interest and one involved very little sleuthing at all on the part of the protagonist unless you define sleuthing much more broadly than I do. “Patriotic Gestures” has a Crime Scene technician use her skills to discover who vandalized the flag she had hanging out front and those of her neighbors. It seems prosaic, but is not. In “Jury Duty” a juror has her own reasons for not wanting to be selected to serve on this particular jury. “Spinners” is about an obese (her words) woman who develops antipathy toward the spinning instructor as she loses 80 lbs. Her revenge is thwarted when he is killed in the exercise room.

Good Kindle price. ( )