A Moment on the Edge: 100 Years of Crime Stories by Women

""Crime is mankind on the edge... stepping out of the norm,"" Elizabeth George writes in the introduction to her anthology A Moment on the Edge, a wide-ranging collection of crime stories by 20th-century British and American women. Perennial favorites (Dorothy L. Sayers, Marcia Muller) mingle with more mainstream writers (Joyce Carol Oates, Nadine Gordimer). Arranged chronologically, the volume includes sterling examples of both British stories a la Agatha Christie and distinctively American tales, such as Susan Glaspell's stark story of frontier misery, ""A Jury of Her Peers,"" which heads the collection. .