This is a Reacher-free collection of twenty short stories from Lee Child. I hardly ever read short stories, but seeing "Lee Child" on the cover is a pretty powerful draw. I won't try to summarize each one. A library book, I read one or two stories a day.
Many, but not all, involve crime or violence in some way. Some are first-person narratives, and the narrators are not all upstanding citizens. Sometimes justice is meted out, other times not. Many are done in a gritty, spare, cynical style familiar from the Reacher tales. But there's one story that's just a single eight-page paragraph.
And many of the stories provide O. Henry-style twists at the end, occasionally in the very last paragraph, or even the last sentence. (I hope I'm accurate about that; I haven't read any O. Henry since, I think, sixth grade.)
I found the stories to be interesting and … well, "enjoyable" would be a stretch for the ones where the bad guys win. And that's the thing about short stories: even if you're not captivated, they're short and will be over soon.
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