An introduction to the writings of novelist Steven Arnett that provides a good illustration of its flavor and diversity. It includes several stories that fall into the thriller/suspense genre, and many others as well. Besides this collection, Mr. Arnett is the author of five novels: Winners and Losers, Death on Lake Michigan, The Labyrinth, The Summer of Robert Byron, and The Strange Curse of Breda.

It’s 1971 and a horrible murder has occurred near the town of Breda in west Michigan. A young woman, Jane Lucas, has been dragged into the woods and stabbed. The letters ZOSO from the Led Zeppelin album have been written in blood on her waist, which leads the police to think it might be a cult murder. Suspicion falls on the commune located on a farm near the town. The shock and horror townspeople feel after that murder, though, are nothing compared to the shock and horror people feel when another murder and then another murder of the same type occur. The Strange Curse of Breda is about those murders and how they are finally solved. As each murder occurs, the level of fear in Breda intensifies, to the point that the townsfolk either flee the town, arm themselves to the teeth, or fall into an almost catatonic state of fear. The county sheriff, the state police, and even the FBI are baffled. However, Jim Leiden, a young man who runs a small grocery in Breda, finds a clue that may link all the murders together: The hanging of a man named Obadiah Kurtz that occurred in 1889. Jim researches the story and finds that the victims are descendants of the people who were responsible for hanging Obadiah. After Jim’s discovery, he’s in a race against time to try to get the police to believe him and find the murderer before he can kill the only person in the whole world who really matters to him: His beautiful fiancée Julie Veere, who happens to be one of those direct descendants!

It’s fall 1966, and Robert Byron has returned to his home town of Blue Spring in Michigan after serving in Vietnam. Everyone there tries to welcome him home, but he’s unsocial and ends up alienating almost everyone. He pretty much keeps to himself through the winter, until the money he’d saved up in Vietnam runs outs, and he has to go back to work. He meets Jean Summers, a teacher at Blue Spring High School who’d just started her teaching career the previous fall herself, when Robert is hired by her landlord to do some work on the house she’s renting. They’re complete opposites in personality, but somehow, they’re attracted to each other anyway. The Summer of Robert Byron is their story: Of how Jean tries to redeem through love Robert’s alienation and the dark secret that he has brought home with him from the war. Can she succeed or is it too late to ever really bring him home again?

A romantic adventure wrapped in a thriller, The Labyrinth chronicles the strange life and death of John Jones, whose involvement in a murder when he was 15 years old shapes his whole life afterward. Four people read the manuscript he leaves behind and try to answer this question: Who really was John Jones?

Biography of Napier Collyns, who was at the heart of the small group of planners, economists and forecasters at Shell (which included Pierre Wack, Ted Newland and, later, Peter Schwartz) who invented and pioneered scenario planning.