An easy read, well-plotted, and often surprising, these four stories should please most readers with a taste for the ironic. The philandering, eccentric character of "Uncle Oswald" is a hedonistic delight, and the two stories involving him are certainly the better half of this small collection. It takes a masterful writer to make such an amoral protagonist work, in any context. The other two tales, involving a wife-swapping and a widow ready to try intimacy again, are less gripping, and a bit anticlimactic with their payoffs.