The weaker sex?

I don't think so.

Not after reading Joyce Carol Oates' collection of nine short stories involving mystery and suspense, in which the protagonist is either a woman or a child contemplating or causing the death of another.

"The Female of the Species" is a fast read and perfect for a change of pace from a full-fledged novel. It's the kind of book you can plow through all at once or dip in and out of as you please. I read it in a single weekend and pretty much agreed with what various critics said in the promotional blurbs accompanying the book -- it's gripping, creepy and imaginative.

Whether the main character is an abused wife or an adulterer, a 6-year-old climbing to a rooftop with her infant brother, a dying woman looking back on her past or a mild-mannered nurse dispensing her brand of mercy in the wee hours of the morning, Oates pulls you in with great characterization and luminous prose.

An excerpt from "Angel of Mercy":

A pillow. A pillow is best. She'd come to believe so. for when the patient is smothered, oxygen ceases to flow to the brain and the heart races and lunges and begins to falter and fails and will stop. And where, in the City of the Damned, hearts are old, leaky, strained, there is a yearning to stop. And so an ordinary pillow over the mouth and nose satisfies this yearning. And so the death pronouncement will be cardiac arrest. And so no physician would suspect, for why would he? Nor any nurse, mostly. Though Agnes must be alert to her sister nurses who look upon her (she has reason to think) with some suspicion.

Oates is way too prolific for me to have read even a tiny fraction of her novels and short stories. But what I've read -- "We Were The Mulvaneys" and "The Falls" -- I've thoroughly enjoyed. Some writers are absolutely in command of their material and it shows in every single sentence. Oates is one of those masters.

Here's an unofficial home page about the author that's pretty comprehensive: http://jco.usfca.edu/index.html