This delightful husband-and-wife collaboration features three stories by two-time Shamus award-winner Max Allan Collins, four stories by acclaimed short-story writer Barbara Collins, and two stories that the couple co-wrote. Among the contributions from Max Allan Collins — whose credits include novels, nonfiction, film criticism, songwriting, and four independent films — is “Catgate,” in which a womanizing senator tries to replace his dead mistress with a lookalike. Barbara Collins’ work has been included in the first three volumes of The Year’s 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories. Her pieces include “The Inconvenience Store,” in which a late-night craving drives a pregnant...

Five Star authors (and husband and wife Barbara and Max Allan Collins team up again on the novel Bombshell, about a star-crossed meeting between a man who held the fate of the world in his hand, and the woman who became America's most unlikely diplomat, in a history mystery that just might have happened. September 1959 — the height of the Cold War. As American school children "duck and cover" in classroom drills, Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev suddenly announces he wants to visit the United States. President Eisenhower, eager to defuse the mounting tension — and show the communist ruler the advantages of capitalism — agrees to the history-making trip. Khrushchev has only two...