“And thereby hangs a tale”  

          by Jeffrey Archer

Review #186

This book is one of Archer’s  collection of short fiction features…stories based (sometimes rather loosely) on true incidents or people. Of the 15 stories in this book, 10 are supposed to be based on known incidents, which means, for example, that something similar to the very clever method of stealing jewelry described in “Stuck on You”, might actually have been tried...or that someone like Benny, the too-clever-for-his-own-good prison stoolie, might really have sentenced himself to a life of looking over his shoulder.

Aside from the fact that they're marked with an asterisk, it's hard to tell the true stories from the outright fictional ones.  In all of them, Archer creates engaging characters and puts them into situations that range from tragic to comic to . . . a little strange.

Doesn’t really matter because I enjoyed all of them!