This volume of stories, many of them published here for the first time, spans almost fifty years of Highsmith's career. Showing the evolution of her writing from her days as a struggling freelancer living in New York in the 1940s to her later years when she was an expatriate in Switzerland, they reveal her trademark dark themes, such as the married man who dates women out of secret revenge against their sex, and the suicidal woman who finds that in her despair she is a sexual magnet. These are suspenseful, playful, taut and psychologically gripping stories, evidence of an extraordinary talent.