This volume contains roughly half the short stories Highsmith wrote, arranged chronologically so that we can see how the self-consciously literary style and careful eschewing of melodrama in her early work gives way to her characteristic method of relating lurid events in a scrupulously flat, affectless voice, resulting in a deliciously discomfiting sense of amorality. One alarming consequence of reading the stories in order is that about halfway through the settings switch abruptly from the US to places like Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds (Highsmith lived in England in the 1960s).
