Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

"This isn’t one of those collections that go to great lengths to show you their writer’s range. We already know that Margaret Atwood can do many, many things very well. But here, she often focuses on the side of her writing self that might be called “wicked,” both in the nature of some of her characters and in the pleasing slyness and cleverness that inform the whole book. The character Verna in the title story is a serial husband-killer who goes on a cruise of the Arctic, where she sets her deadly designs on someone from long in her past. As usual, you want to follow Atwood anywhere."