Lori Hahnel's second book, a collection of short stories, covers some of the same territory as her recent novel, Love Minus Zero, but it also explores new themes and relationships. She again looks at what it is like to love a man who is incapable of returning the love. The stories in the first half of the book often seemed a little too light to me, as if the writer had not quite figured out how to go beyond a clever twist or a glancing insight to achieve its conclusion. A story like "The Selfish Professor", for example, is puzzling because it has what amounts to a trick ending that yields little but bemusement to the reader. But with "Sisters of Mercy" and the stories that follow in the second half of the book, Hahnel starts to come to grips with deeper themes . From that point on the author's craft really starts to come together. With stories like "Ghost Rag", "Close to the Bone" and "Valediction", the author wrestles with what it means to lose a loved one to death, whether it was a recent love or a love that returns from the distant past. As with her novel, Hahnel puts to good use her own experiences as a punk rock performer on the Calgary music scene in the early 1980s, and also shows good knowledge of old movies and music to flesh out her themes. This is a good first collection, and it is to be hoped that Hahnel will continue to pursue the darker but more powerful themes that are the substance of the stories that appear at the end of this collection.