Deadly Guests

In each of the ten stories herein, all published in UK and US magazines, characters must often grapple with the consequences of getting what they want.

In the title story, a suburban New Jersey couple, confronted by an old friend showing up in a stolen car with her boyfriend who had been robbing stores all the way from Florida, must rely upon their daughter, home from college on spring break, to find a solution that is almost perfect . . . but not quite.

"The Boot Scraper" finds a lonely man praised by an attractive and flirtatious younger woman for the murder of her abusive husband, which he did not commit. In "Straight Shooter," an indulgent mother succumbs to her daughter's manipulations and keeps shooting the wrong people. An embezzler in "You Will Be Very Happy Here" ends up as a worker on a coffee plantation and finds that escaping to Costa Rica and losing his loot gets him what he really wants, sort of. In "Stalkers," an American teacher on holiday in London sublets the flat of an overly ambitious gallery director with dire consequences.

The ten stories take the reader from a middle-class town where a jilted woman becomes a kleptomaniac, to a small Vermont town where an out-of-work journalist decides to be a stick-up man and ends up being a hero, to Florence in the 1970s where a man gleefully witnesses his old girlfriend pushing her husband off a bridge, and London, where art is a matter of death.