These characters may be the usual suspects, making the usual mistakes, but their stories are not the usual fare. Populated by pretenders, ex-cons, and wannabes who bend the rules, break the law, and risk everything to salvage their own hearts, the twelve stories in The Usual Mistakes conduct readers into a world where betrayal is just a beginning. Deception, infidelity, even death-where a person goes from there is the mainspring of Erin Flanagan's fiction, and in the turns her characters take, we find rare insights: that we are often wedded to one another because of, not in spite o