Robert Boswell, author of the highly acclaimed Mystery Ride and Crooked Hearts, has written a stunning new collection of short stories. In them, he brings us into the familiar territory of family relationships and brilliantly describes the strain, the humor, the confusion, and the kaleidoscope of feelings these bonds evoke. But he also introduces us to new terrain as he places us in worlds so heightened by emotion that, at times, the commonplace turns eerie and the odd becomes downright scary. In "Rain," Karen and Orla are paired off in a search party formed to find a lost boy during a storm. Although the boy is located, the two women discover during their search that parts of themselves, over the years, have gone missing. In "Glissando," a father and son drift through life, jobs, schools, towns, and women trying to both find and escape their past. An alcoholic husband, in "The Good Man," resolves to stop drinking after he finds a note tacked to the door from his wife that says "Good-bye, you shit." In order to get his family back, he suffers through maggot-filled hallucinations and vomit-covered nights at the rehabilitation center, but the worst of not drinking has yet to come. Alvin and Rita Bishop lose their infant girl to crib death in "The Earth's Crown"; Rita goes mad with grief and Alvin has an affair with a pregnant woman. "The Products of Love" tells of Paula and Eugene's mysterious marriage. And in "Living to Be a Hundred," three men on a construction crew hammer out their lives and loves - literally. Soul-piercing and freshly funny, these stories are at once strikingly contemporary and timeless in their power to move us. The vagaries of human relationships form the warp and woof of these complex, well-crafted stories. Boswell's characters balance on the razor-sharp edge where conflicting emotions meet, struggling toward an understanding of themselves and the abiding mystery of their lives. In "Rain," the thirtyish Linda discovers a lost part of herself through her friend Orla as they search the woods for a missing boy. "The Earth's Crown" explores changes in the relationship between a Kansas grocer and his wife after the loss of a child. "Grief" concerns a woman whose animosity toward the young man responsible for her daughter's death is transformed when she has a vision of him as an angel. These are rich and psychologically satisfying tales. For most public libraries. - Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. Boswell is one of the best. His fiction, including the terrific novel, Mystery Ride (1992), is laced with subtle psychology and alive with quirky personalities. This short-story collection revolves around moments of truth and decision, which, more often than not, are actually moments of utter confusion and bitter helplessness. Threesomes are a frequent configuration in these nomadic tales, many of which take place in the gritty Southwest, where the dunning heat explodes petty troubles into crises. In the title story, a man is just a hot breath away from losing his wife to a friend, while in "The Products of Love," a man is too cautious about declaring his love for his married neighbor. "Rain" traces the kaleidescoping of a woman's perceptions and longings after she, her husband, and the woman across the street help search for a missing boy. And, finally, in "The Earth's Crown," a grocer in a tiny Kansas town goes back to his lover, a surrogate mother, right after his wife threatens to leave him because "there are ten thousand ways to ruin your life." And, mysteriously enough, many are suffused with beauty and the thrill of surrender. Donna Seaman From the author of Mystery Ride, a collection of short stories that too often read like a few good characters in search of a major insight. All have previously been published in venues such as the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories 1989, and Ploughshares. An accomplished creator of vivid characters thoroughly and lovingly realized, Boswell is less original when it comes to creating defining moments for them. In the first story, ``Rain,'' which previously appeared in the New Yorker, a young woman joins a search party for a young boy lost in the nearby woods, and, long after the boy is found, finds herself questioning her marriage, her attraction to her co-searcher Orla (a divorced neighbor) and her longing to return to the forest. Only a re-enactment of the search with Orla gives her the less than earth-shattering epiphany she has been searching for. In ``The Good Man,'' the second New Yorker story and one of the best in the book, the match between character and situation is more subtly nuanced as a recovering alcoholic moves with his wife and family to Arizona, where his wife ``misses trees, grass, rain, snow but mostly trees,'' and sometimes even the way her husband used to be when he drank. Other notable stories are ``Grief,'' in which parents struggle to accept the death of a daughter i