FIVE STORIES / CHRISTMAS DAY · DECEMBER 25, 2026
Five standalone stories about women. Different lives, different places, universal truths.
No Angel Came: Five Stories brings together five distinct Evelyn Marie Shantz works under one literary identity.
The collection is not marketed as a crime-story package. These are standalone stories about women, told across different lives and places.
Each story opens on a woman whose work, memory or desire changes what the evidence can mean, while keeping the ending undisclosed.
FIVE STORIES
01 OF 05 · STANDALONE STORY
At 4:10 on the Friday before Christmas, Helen Bittner finds thirty-two dollars and forty cents that does not belong anywhere. What looks like a small discrepancy forces a woman who knows the work to decide how closely she is willing to look.
02 OF 05 · STANDALONE STORY
In April 1894, photographer Harriet Leland follows a dry acequia through New Mexico Territory, where diverted water, altered records and local knowledge point in different directions. As her camera gives her confidence faster than truth, the search tests her bond with Dr. Almira Keene and who gets to control incomplete evidence.
03 OF 05 · STANDALONE STORY
In rain-soaked Vancouver, six women at the Night Owl answering service face a dead police sergeant, a running recorder and a switchboard that will not stop lighting up. Before morning, every call tightens the pressure around what they know, what they owe one another and what the city expects them to surrender.
04 OF 05 · STANDALONE STORY
Las Vegas, 1960. While Ocean’s 11 is being filmed along the Strip, a skilled female card dealer is welcome before the cameras but barred from the casino tables. Her lover discovers the record behind that hypocrisy and must decide whether knowing the truth is enough.
05 OF 05 · STANDALONE STORY
At a postwar Hollywood studio, stenographer Adelaide Bennett slips a private account of a vanished love into a script routed to film editor Beatrice Malloy. As pages marked in blue travel through a workplace built to erase women’s contributions, discovery risk opens the possibility of being known by another woman.
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