Lawrence Block states: "It's a complete collection of Matthew Scudder short fiction, from a pair of novelettes written in the mid-1970’s to a brand-new story that’s less than two months old.

"There are eleven stories in all. (My late friend Don Westlake would call it a thief’s dozen.) Nine of them have been published in magazines and/or collected in various anthologies. One piece, “Mick Ballou Looks at the Blank Screen,” has appeared only as the text of a 100-copy limited broadside. And the final story, the elegiac “One Last Night at Grogan’s,” was written this summer and is published here for the first time.

"There’s also a moving appreciation of the Scudder series by screenwriter/director Brian Koppelman, who tells what the books have meant to him since he discovered them as a teenager. And I’ve added an afterword that puts the stories in context and recounts some of the circumstances of their composition. There were times over the years when it looked as though Scudder and I were through with each other, and it was through short fiction that the series kept going."