Cheaters and other stories

the long version

In the title story, a private investigator reluctantly takes on a domestic case that unexpectedly revisits a painful episode from his past. "Honeymoon" is narrated by a young I.R.A. terrorist who finds, on the eve of his wedding, that he's uncertain about both his political and personal commitments. The drug-abusing journalist in "Winterlude," still reeling from an unraveled marriage, becomes entangled with an attractive but troubled shoplifter. Their mutual downward spiral finally takes them to the depths of a violent revenge pact. And in "Grace," a story of mythic resonance, a young husband wrestles an impossible weight of secret guilt after his wife is brutally raped while he's sleeping with another woman. Time and again, Dean Albarelli searingly limns the twin bugaboos of guilt and responsibility, reminding us that ours is a world in which, as a character reflects in the title story, "compromise will be part of anything [we ever know] in the way of happiness."