This is a collection of 9 stories, some fairly short, others much longer plus an introduction to the collection by the author. Most of the stories in this 2002 collection were first published in magazines and anthologies from 1991 to 2000. I picked this collection up primarily to read the title story "The Retrieval Artist", a Hugo-nominated novella which the author has subsequently turned into a continuing series of novels. Some of the other stories became novels later, as well. In her intro, KKR says that all of her short stories might become novels at some time. Most of these could probably be described as mystery type stories within a science fiction setting.

Generally speaking I enjoyed these stories quite a bit. They are different from my usual reads and I thought most were good. Nothing amazing here, but overall a good read. "The Retrieval Artist" was a good science fiction mystery, a mystery within a mystery and long enough to draw that mystery out. The only story I thought a bit of a dud was "Present". Two related stories, "Dancers Like Children" and "Alien Influences" had a strange underlying premise to me, but overall I liked the stories themselves. "Alien Influences" is a separate story but it builds off of events that occured in "Dancers Like Children".

There is a kind of old-fashioned pulpy feel to parts of this, most notably in the story "Flowers and the Last Hurrah" which is a near future detective story involving the murder of a famous singer's clone.

The final story in the collection, "Withot End", I had read a year ago when I read an old issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It is a philosophical piece about a man who has lost his wife and he believes, as did his wife, that they can be reunited if they can just get their minds to understand time in a non-linear fashion. An interesting character study.

One minor quibble: There were a surprising number of typos in The Retrieval Artist. Grammatical errors and mispelled words and incorrect word substitutions, extra words, misplaced words. Than/that waiver/waver, that sort of thing. Odd. ( )