This book contains 12 original short stories that represent a number of subgenres within the broad field of crime and mystery fiction. From the humorous and explicitly comic to the dark and brooding, they vary in setting from early 21st-century Cincinnati to mid-18th-century London. Faithful readers will notice elements that served as early studies for one of the author's favorite Tom Deaton novels. They were all written in a spirit of admiration for the breadth and depth of specific branches of contemporary genre fiction and serve as a kind of creative extension of the author's Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction.