The great Czech writer Karel Capek´s unique approaches to the mysteries of justice and truth are full of twists and turns, the ordinary and the extraordinary, humor and humanism. Capek´s delightfully inventive tales ... stretch the detective story to its limits and, in the process, tell us much about the mysteries of human existence. --N. Y. Times Book Review One of the Best Books of 1994. --Publishers Weekly Best known for creating the literary robot in his 1920 play *R.U.R. (Rossum´s Universal Robots),* Capek wrote two volumes of stories that played with all the rules of the still young mystery genre (this was 1929). They´re funny, sad, sometimes frightening. And you never know where they´re going!