Love and Deceit: 10 Short Stories with Strategic Lies, Risky Tricks, and Tangled Lives

Love and Deceit's ten stories introduce sometimes-quirky characters who grapple with lies big and small.

Lost in Atlanta, Hiding from Love's Truth reveals why a woman would mysteriously abandon the young man she deeply loves and contact him 52 years later to ask forgiveness for something he never considered wrong.

Uncle Norbert's Naked Ambition describes a man's desire for a crowning lifetime achievement, pursued with inept stealth, of convincing his extremely prudish wife to join a naturist club. Both husband and wife are willing to deceive the other for what they believe are beneficial purposes.

110 Percent Marriage Foolishness finds a former high school over-achiever struggling with life reversals. A self-deluding family friend helps in many ways, including trying to be a marriage matchmaker. Sometimes marriages that should work out don't, while those that seem improbable do.

Refueling Love with Lies gives divorce lawyers a chance to rescue a marriage, and a clever wife the opening to wear a fetching emerald blouse, tell outrageous lies, and get exactly what she wants even though plain honesty would have worked just fine.

Risky Adventures with the Mystery Visitor probes the anxieties of a man who is so distraught about a failed relationship that he's willing to accept an intriguing offer of adventurous sex, and ends up with a blindfold covering his eyes and brain.

The Lazy Wish Fairy Makes Amends follows a man given the opportunity to fulfill his teenage fantasy of a relationship with an attractive older neighbor. Both parties engage in deception to try to get what they want. One succeeds. But can love survive such an audacious lie?

The Marriage-Counseling Genius features a car sales manager who offers free "professional" advice to a distraught man, trying to save a marriage because his cheating produced two divorces from two sisters. He's also hopeful of reconciling with one of the sisters, and he doesn't care which.

Happy Mother's Day, Unofficially is a tale of abandonment, a conspiracy of parental lies, a daughter's unrelenting yearning for a dead mother, an apparent resurrection, and an opportunity for a relationship rescue through an unintended intervention.

Hurried Departures from Love and Hate explains how a marriage failed in perhaps record time, 80 minutes. Seeking reconciliation following a long and unexplained disappearance, the groom risks a painful and vengeful death after the bride goes full-out animal crazy.

The Goddess of the Pottery Vase unravels a web of deceit that leaves a woman reeling and wondering how she could ever have become involved in such a complicated, damaging relationship mess. The goddess knows plenty about that, and in her own way she tells a twisted tale that reveals deceit running in multiple directions. The spousal perpetrators are also the victims, and the apparent love winner becomes the love loser.

Dettagli