TURNING THE TABLES

Helen Nielsen was a master of the turnabout. Her stories rarely end on a predictable note, rarely going where you think they are going to go. These fifteen stories, originally published from 1957 to 1991 in the pages of Alfred Hitchcock's and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazines, display her wide range of storytelling at its best.

As editor Bill Kelly points out in his introduction, her full range is represented here, from mystery puzzle story, police procedural, domestic malice, trial drama, cozy, comic mystery to one story that might almost be classified as pure horror.

Anthony Boucher once observed in his New York Times column that Helen Nielsen wrote "in a vein of quietly observant realism, underlined by sustained emotional horror."

She certainly never wrote the same story twice. Here are fifteen of Nielsen's very best.