A Twist in the Tail   By: Jeffrey Archer

This book has ten short stories from master-storyteller Jeffrey Archer all containing unexpected surprises for the reader. A first reading makes you want to know what will happen. A second reading makes you understand why it happened. The third reading makes you think.
I have chosen to retell these two stories because I thought they were the best

 The perfect murder.
This first story is about a ordinary man who is married and works for a company. He tells this story as if it was his diary. The company he used to work for, has just been taken over by another one. And that company is sacking allot of people including his ”Number Two” in the accounts department and he is expected to cover his work as well and he can’t complain because he is afraid that he to will get fired. This man also has a secret loving affair with a girl called Carla that only he and she knows about. And that is lucky for him. One night as he is about to leave his office he calls home to his wife and says that he will come home earlier this night. On the way home he stops by to se how Carla is doing. When he is outside her house he sees a man going out of her house and that Carla is going after him and that she is giving him a kiss that hardly could be called sisterly. He observes the mans every move and watches him remove a parking ticket from the windscreen of his blue BMW. He also sees what he is wearing and how he looks. He becomes very jealous and walks straight in to Carla and says that he has seen everything. Carla doesn’t understand anything and askes him what it is. He explains what he has seen to Carla, she says that it was an insurance broker and that she gave him a ”goodbye-kiss”. Carla gets very angry and hits him on the chin. They start to argue about everything. Suddenly in an uncontrolled moment he strikes Carla on the side of the chin and runs out of the house not knowing what he is doing. When he comes home to his wife he knows that he has to call Carla to apologise. When he calls nobody answers. He thinks that she must had gone out somewhere and goes to sleep. The next morning before he gets to work he drives by Carlas house to see how she is doing. Outside her house there are a lot of policemen and an ambulance. He starts to wish that this has nothing to do with him hitting Carla. The following days a lot of things happens. For a start he finds out that he has killed Carla by hitting her so hard that she broke her jaw and fell on the floor and instantly died. and later in the week he gets fired aswell. He comes up with an idea, he will blame that insurance guy that Carla was with the hours before. He makes an anonymous tip to the police and speaks with the officer in charge, Inspector Simmons. He tells him about the car and the parking ticket and what he looked like. The police can easily pick the man up whose name is Paul Menzies, he gets arrested for the murder. And the next day he sits in the court together with Paul Menzies, the judge, Mr Robert Scott (Paul´s attorney) and Sir Humphrey Mountcliff (the prosecutor). He follows their case every day and at first it looks good for Paul but it becomes more worse and worse for every hour and when the court finds out that Paul is lying about the fact that sexual intercourse has taken place, not many people find him innocent. And in the end when the jury is going to read their verdict you will get a big surprise, the man who is I in the story who really is the killer, is the foreman of the jury. Paul Menzies gets the electric chair.

The Loophole
This is the ninth story in the book and is quit hard to understand but the second time you read it you will understand it. It is very good. It is about two persons who are very good friends. The first one, Philip Masters, is a successful storyteller and a multi millionaire. He has  a wife, Sally, and they have a son. Philip is the godfather of Michael’s daughter, and Michael is godfather to Philips son. Michael has been newly redundant and he and his wife Carol have very bad economy. Through the years Michael has been fired over ten times. Both Michael and Philip are members of the Haslemere Golf Club. And that’s where the story begins. Michael and Philip are having an argument and the members in the clubhouse are listening. Philip says he knows why Michael doesn’t have a job and that he is unfaithful to his wife. Just as Michael raises his hand to hit Philip, the clubowner enters and demands an explanation. Both Michael and Philip get suspended for a couple of weeks and during those weeks a lot of things happened. Michael sues Philip for a hundred thousand pounds because Philip said some words he shouldn´t. Even the headlines in the newspaper are about ”the quarrel on the Haslemere Golf Club”. Michael wins the case and gets his hundred thousand pounds. And when he comes home to his wife he is very happy. But his wife cant´t believe how he can be happy over some money when he has just lost his best friend. When their suspension from the club is revoked both Philip and Michael feel to play and at the clubtower the members are watching them with binoculars and wondering how they so quickly became such friends after the trial, they seem to be better friends than ever before. Their conversation at the green: 
-I end up with forty thousand pounds, while you lose nothing at all.
-Only because I pay tax at the highest rate and can therefore claim the loss as a legitimate business expense. And I, as a successful litigant, need pay no tax at all on damages received in a civil case
-A loophole.