A Twist in the Tale

I do enjoy Jeffrey Archer's short stories - more so than his novels. This set had a mixture of stories - but all had something unexpected in the end - a twist in the tale. There was even a short story that was based on wine tasting - very close to my heart :)

I will only do an in-depth review on one though, 'Clean Sweep Ignatius.' This was one of the shortest short stories - and is located near the front. Ignatius Agarbi is the seventeenth Nigerian Minister of Finance in seventeen years. He is going to do what no other Minister has done - make a clean sweep of corruption in the government. He then proceeds to do just that - he does a clean sweep - and it is very interesting and humorous in just how he does it. Yes there is a twist in the show more tale - but to reveal it would be to give the plot away.

A good book to have beside the bed so you can read one story and go to sleep. show less

Each story in this collection ends with a twist, or unexpected conclusion. About half of them worked pretty well. The style is clumsy at times but not a serious deterrent to enjoyment.

Another collection of well-written self-contained stories. Ones that stood out to me as particularly enjoyable were "A La Carte" (who doesn't like to see a child appreciate the sacrifices of their parents?), "The Steal" and "Colonel Bullfrog". The people in these stories were people I would want to know.

A pretty good selection of short stories. Some of the twists I truly did not see coming. Good variety of topics and points of view.

A stronger collection than A Quiver Full of Arrows but still marred by the obvious or the inane.

These stories made a car drive go very quickly. I thought the stories were a little patchy, and one just downright boring. However as one of Amazon's reviewers commented "The book is very appropriately named, because the very end of each story has a bizarrre "twist" that you don't expect. The twist happens literally in the last sentence or two of each story, and the reader is completely surprised."
There were a couple of tales which were very very good.

This is a wonderful collection of stories. It isn't hard to understand how this man wound up becoming a criminal himself...