[In "A Woman Like That"] Emily's mild, put-upon father strangles her mother, the "bright-eyed, brazen, beautiful" Jane, who has been flaunting her infidelities and general viciousness for years.

Emily,… a difficult, intense adolescent, saves her father by lying at his trial and then seeks to put her childhood behind her by becoming a mother herself….

Mrs. Shreve has striven hard for the Greek note of inexorable fate…. But she has pared her characters so far past the point of elemental simplicity that there's little left but the sort of tag whereby dancing on tables signifies devil-may-care abandon.

It doesn't matter so much that the plot itself is obvious, that we know brazen Jane will get her comeuppance but still destroy her daughter's life; what matters is that she is so one-dimensional we cannot believe in Emily's horror when in her madness she looks in the mirror and sees...