Short Fuses (Four free short stories) by Stephen Leather (Epub)

Description

Four free short stories from bestselling author Stephen Leather, plus opening chapters of six of his bestselling thrillers.

The short stories are: Breaking In (where a burglar gets more than he bargained for when he breaks into a London house), Strangers On A Train (where a mugging on a train doesn’t go to plan), Inspector Zhang and the Hotel Guest (where the Singaporean detective solves a mystery) and Cat’s Eyes (the backstory of a Bangkok go-go dancer).

There are also tasters of six of his bestselling novels, including The Chinaman, The Vets and The Birthday Girl.

Stephen Leather is one of the UK’s most successful thriller writers. He was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers such as The Times, the Daily Mail and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. Before that, he was employed as a biochemist for ICI, shovelled limestone in a quarry, worked as a baker, a petrol pump attendant, a barman, and worked for the Inland Revenue. He began writing full time in 1992. His bestsellers have been translated into more than ten languages. He has also written for television shows such as London’s Burning, The Knock and the BBC’s Murder in Mind series. Two of his books, The Stretch and The Bombmaker, were made into movies.

User’s Reviews

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Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ Collections of short stories by the same author are often like a sampler plate at a restaurant. They give readers an opportunity to see and appreciate the author’s range in terms of style and subject matter, while not requiring too much of an investment by the reader in any material they might not care for that much. Stephen Leather’s “Short Fuses,” a collection of four stories offered for free on Amazon as a promotion, is an excellent sampler, featuring well written stories so different in tone and subject matter that readers may find it hard to believe the same man wrote them all.”Breaking In” is the story of a cat burglar whose most recent crime goes horribly awry. Richie Grout is a pro whose specialty is climbing into upstairs flats while the residents are asleep and helping himself to whatever he can easily remove from living and family rooms, including car keys when they’re left out. This time, however, he finds he’s not the only criminal on the premises, as a couple of far more sinister figures have gotten inside before him. “Breaking In” is the type of story Alfred Hitchcock used to feature in his magazine and television show. It’s got a clever idea, some good dialogue, and a tidy wrapup, all in less than 20 pages.Speaking of Hitchcock, Leather’s second story, “Strangers on a Train,” takes its title (but little else) from a classic Hitchcock film. The story could more realistically be called “Die Hard on a Subway Car.” A group of street punks have taken the art of mugging to a new level. They get on a subway car, immediately pull weapons and terrorize the occupants, grab what valuables they can, and leave at the next exit. As with Richie Grout in the first story, their plans go awry because someone even more dangerous is there before them, a shadowy type who is very adept at defending himself. Leather hints that the unidentified man is his series hero, Spider Shepherd. But, whoever he is, Leather does a good job of describing the exciting action as the stranger coolly sizes up the street gang and how best to take them on.”Inspector Zhang and the Hotel Guest” features Leather’s occasional short story protagonist, Inspector Zhang of the Singapore police department. The Zhang stories are a throwback to the Agatha Christie classical style mysteries, as Zhang solves the case by logic and everyone behaves oh-so-properly. There’s no actual murder here; instead, a man is found beaten in a hotel room registered to a female guest. He has no identification and can’t remember who he is or how he got there. The hotel manager calls in Zhang to figure things out. This story is somewhat flawed and the weakest of the collection, although still entertaining. It’s a definite change of pace from the harder nosed slam bang action pieces for which Leather is best known, and readers who enjoy that style writing may not like the more sedate pace or the more stylized writing here. On the other hand, readers who like Christie (as I do) may find this case rather too easy.The last story, “Cat’s Eyes,” is also the shortest and the only traditional dramatic story in the collection. A man make the acquaintance of a call girl in a Bangkok strip club and winds up learning her life story, which Leather relates in a couple of tightly written, surprisingly dramatic pages. There’s enough material in this woman’s life story to fill a much larger work, but Leather gives a synopsis that still has an emotional impact. Obviously, there’s a limit to how powerful a statement any writer can make in a handful of pages, but Leather succeeds in making the reader (and the customer narrator of the story) actually think about her as a person.Of these stories, “Breaking In” and “Strangers” are excellent, “Cat’s Eyes” is very good, and “Inspector Zheng” is good. The stories are remarkably different in style, tone, and subject matter, so much so that readers might easily assume they were the work of four different authors. All in all, and especially considering the price, namely zero, “Short Fuses” is highly worthwhile reading.One further comment: although the stories themselves are very good overall, the layout of the book is slightly annoying, though. Instead of just presenting the stories, Leather provides a commentary between the various stories, which includes, in a couple of places, links to similar stories available on Amazon. These transitions are a bit awkward. In addition, the four stories together take up only one-third of the book. The remainder consists of a series of excerpts from Leather’s various novels. Since the collection is free, I can’t complain too much, but some readers may be put off at how short the actual stories are in comparison to the filler material.

⭐ Stephen Leather has composed quite a few books and short stories. All are good, some are superb. Leather is good at giving interesting somewhat humorous details, filing his stories with suspense, and snapping readers to attention with surprise endings.Breaking in – Grout is a house burglar who assures readers that he is quite adept at his trade. He tells us that he knows all the tricks and has all the proper implements and has never been caught for robbing. However, this time he stumbles into a house where two men are standing who have just killed the home owner. What is going on? Who are these men? What are they up to? Why did they kill the man? Will they kill Grout?Stranger on a Train – Four youths board a train to rob it during the two minutes between two stations. Their method is to scare all the passengers. But one man is not frightened. Who is he and what does he do? And how do the passengers react?Inspector Zhang and the Hotel Guest – Zhang, a Singapore inspector appears in quite a few Leather tales. Here he comes across a man who tells him he lost his memory. The man is in the room of a woman who rented the room for a single night. The man says he has been robbed. Zhang uses Sherlock Holmes type of deductions to discover who the man is, why he is in the room, and what happened.Cat’s Eyes – A man picks up a prostitute in a bar and she tells him the story of her life, a story that disturbs him.Amazon charges nothing for this book. It is worth much more.

⭐ The short stories are good, but quite short!Over half of the book consists of first chapters from several of the author’s other books, most of which sound quite interesting as well. My copy has the sample chapters following the short stories unlike some other reviewers who indicated that the sample chapters were interspersed between them causing confusion.

⭐ This book is so much about mayhem, mayhem, and more. I can’t remember reading a book like this before. I guess the story line is how to create havoc and do more of the same.

⭐ The problem with this book it was just the beginning of books that we have already read earlier

⭐ No actual stories, just the set-up for what might be interesting but ultimately just leaves you hanging with no resolution. Not interesting enough to hope for more. Generally unsatisfactory.

⭐ A sampler of Stephen Leather’s various genres.All rather good, pick your favorite and collect the others in that series.

⭐ I really enjoy Stephen Leather’s works. I began reading the Spider Shepard series and I am totally hooked. I feel as if I mimic Leather’s action and suspense in my own writing style. This collection of short stories overall is amazing.

⭐ Didn’t bother reading/suffering through the whole book. Stories don’t have an ending they are an advertisement to purchase the rest of the story. Didn’t much care for the writers style so I won’t be buying his books.

⭐ Some of this did not make much sense, however, there were some teasers that sounded very interesting. There were a couple that I intend to follow up.

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