Karma and Other Stories

Five Star offers four new story collections from its stable of talented mystery writers. Berkeley copper Jill Smith investigates the murder of a guru and a series of very bizarre burglaries in Macavity Award-winning author Susan Dunlap's Karma and Other Stories. Richard Colby offers two tales of revenge and three other suspensers, including the novella ""Deadly Desire,"" in which a woman whose ""lust made visible"" gets a brutal comeuppance, in The Last Witness and Other Stories. In Bohannon's Women, Southern California chronicler Joseph Hansen explores Wiccan rituals, survivalists and secret confessions in six stories, most of which feature crusty retired sheriff and current rancher Hack Bohannon. A woman plots to kill her husband in ""Lady Patterly's Lover,"" detective Augustus Fox tries to stem a theater company's ""plague of misfortunes"" in ""The Dastardly Dilemma of the Vicious Vaudevillian"" and drollery reigns in the 17 other tales in Charlotte MacLeod's It Was an Awful Shame and Other Stories.