James M. Cain

"Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men, and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter. Out of these elements, Cain creates a novel of acute social observation and devastating emotional violence, with a heroine whose ambitions...

Contains three novels and five short stories by American author James M. Cain, including "The Postman Always Rings Twice" about a drifter who embarks on a course of destruction when he falls for the wife of Nick, the genial owner of a roadside cafe.

An intimate portrait of a uniquely independent woman who finds herself newly divorced during the Depression years and struggles to carve out a new life for herself and her family. The story explores Mildred's unreasonable devotion to her insatiable daughter Veda, as well as the complex relationship she shares with the indolent men in her life, including her polo-playing lover Monty Beragon and ex-husband Bert Pierce.

Steamy tale of a drifter offered a job at a roadside diner by the owner, an easy-going older man. When the drifter and the owner's voluptuous wife fall in love, they plot to kill her husband and run away together.