“You might find it if you look hard enough. That singular moment everything went off the rails…”
Leave the straight and narrow behind and explore five unique visions of theft, murder, sex, and loss chosen from the last reading period at Orthogonalsf.net.

• As a razor moves across skin, a seemingly everyday conversation becomes painfully significant in Richard Mark Glover’s “Hot Water”
• A grieving woman finds even the most artificial of comforts too much to bear in Alexis Henderson’s “Baby Doll.”
• The new kid on the block gets a lesson in car theft and outlaw history in Dutch Valore’s “Boots on the Ground.”
• In a rural snake-handling church, the vipers are the least of a woman’s fears in Jean McKinney’s “Let the Serpent Judge”
• The childhood game becomes dangerously adult as a man and a woman play for keeps in Ken Brady’s darkly sexual “Cops and Robbers”

The third in an occasional series, “Criminal Variations” continues the OrthogonalSF commitment to publish the best in genre-defying fiction chosen by anonymous submission.  Available for download at Amazon.com.