As the title promises, these stories range from a sheriff who rids his town of a murderer his own way, after talking matters over with a mountain; to a woman who dyes her hair with teen-style purple streaks to wait on staid lawyers and judges in an up-and-coming restaurant; to a priest who--yes--plunges right into the recent headliens of child abuse in one moment of misguided loneliness. But just as the adjacent cover shifts from white to gray, so do the collection's characters--and Taylor reminds us that we alldespite our flashes and forays into one spectrum's end or the other--we all mostly just muddle along, in the ragged gray.