Prepare to meet the most seductively female and the most shockingly fatal of femme fatales, brought to you by seventeen of today's finest authors of mystery and suspense fiction. Award-winning editor Otto Penzler presents a collection of short and sizzling masterpieces of kisses and kiss-offs, gams and gats. Tale after thrilling tale, they'll prove to you just how sexy and not so gentle the 'gentler sex' can be.

In 'Third Party', Jay McInerney takes you on a wild ride through the Paris night with a party girl built for speed and sin... 'Rendezvous', Nelson DeMille's first short story in twenty-five years, plunges you into a Vietnam jungle where the bloodiest scourge of this man's army is no man at all... back in the USA of 'Louly and Pretty Boy', Elmore Leonard introduces a Depression-era teenage gun moll who loves Pretty Boy Floyd more than she likes knocking off filling stations... a very smart blonde takes her shot in Lorenzo Carcaterra's 'A Thousand Miles from Nowhere', a study in slow-simmered vengeance... and Michael Connelly's colourful and ironic 'Cielo Azul' shows how a nameless woman left dead on a Los Angeles hillside can be the most lethal prey of all.

In other riveting tales, a scorned lover claims an old fling's heart, a little too literally... a lady of mystery offers a suicide pact you almost can't refuse... and a she-demon rises from the grave in a bid to rule the earth... These and a bevy of other very bad girls cast their criminal spells through the powerful voices of Joyce Carol Oates, John Connolly, Thomas H. Cook, Jeffrey Deaver, J.A. Jance, Andrew Klavan, Laura Lippman, Ed McBain, Walter Mosely, Anne Perry, Ian Rankin and S.J. Rozan in stories as irresistible as the anti-heroines that blaze through their pages.