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Sarah Weinman has put together a nice collection of 14 true crime short stories. All written by women from the 1940's to the 1970's. A well written introduction explaining her interest in women writers and why she chose these stories. I actually enjoyed each story! ( )

An excellent selection of short stories from women authors of psychological thrillers from the 1940s through the mid 1970s. ( )

This is an excellent collection of short stories by women writing dark suspense fiction toward the middle of the twentieth century. Including fourteen stories, this collection--well-curated by editor Sarah Weinman--is neither too short nor too long. While all of the stories aptly fit the theme and have an appropriately noirish mood, each one stands out as a unique and compelling work. I savored these stories like a box of fine chocolates. Some of the authors, such as Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson, will already be familiar to many readers, but this collection presents a terrific opportunity for discovering new writers. While Weinman laments in the introduction that many of these writers, popular and lauded in their day, have been forgotten over time, a perusal of Amazon reveals that many of their longer works have been revived in electronic form for the Kindle--at reasonable prices, too. I foresee many hours of happy reading time ahead, inspired by the authors included in this terrific collection. ( )

As others have said, this collection of 14 stories is meant to shed light on a largely forgotten literary genre, so-called "domestic mysteries" - stories that draw their suspense from the uniquely strained and fraught interactions that occur within families. No gumshoes (a la Hammett), no feisty elderly detectives (a la Christie) - instead, Weinman's female authors gives us mentally disturbed nannies (Patricia Highsmith's "The Heroine"), desperate widows (Nedra Tyre's "A Nice Place to Stay"), and spoiled daughters (Shirley Jackson's "Louisa, Please Come Home"); women tormented by greed (Miriam Allen Deford's "Mortmain"), by jealousy (Vera Caspary's "Sugar and Spice"), and by Terrible Secrets (Barbara Callahan's "Lavendar Lady"); competent women gone wrong (Helen Nielsen's "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree"; Joyce Harrington's "The Purple Shroud"), competent women sacrificing themselves for their families (Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's "The Stranger in the Car"), and competent women forced to sacrifice their families (Charlotte Armstrong's "The Splintered Monday"); lucky women (Dorothy Hughes's "Everybody Needs a Mink"), devious spinsters (Celia Fremlin's "A Case of Maximum Need"), and creepy children (Dorothy Davis's "Lost Generation"; Margaret Millar's "The People Across the Canyon").

As others have noted in their reviews, Weinman's introductions to each story do achieve the dubious distinction of simultaneously adding little useful info about the authors while incorporating spoilers that manage to rob many of the stories of their surprise. I'm inclined to forgive her the former, because - unlike their male colleagues - many of these women lived their lives in domestic rather than public arenas, making it hard to ferret out revealing biographical detail. However, there's really no excuse for the spoilers. If it's not too late, you may wish to give these introductions a miss.

Some of the stories are more imaginative then others, some more suspenseful than others, but all are competently written and diverting in their "domestic" way. While they may not exude melodramatic pulpiness, they are nevertheless chilling, perhaps precisely because the crimes they describe are domestic, and therefore feel a little more "close to home" than most of us would prefer our crime fiction to be. ( )