THE TOUCH

Swimming is the most transparent sport there is — eight bodies in a lit glass box of water, every length in plain sight, times recorded to the hundredth by touchpads that cannot lie. And that is exactly why it can hide the most: the decisive thing happens not in the clear water but inside the body, and in the years before a swimmer is old enough to consent to what is done to it.

In these eleven stories, women at the edges of the pool — a welfare officer, a physiologist, a classifier, a timing official — read the measured body in the clear water and find the wrong the transparency conceals. They meet it with rigor and conscience, never force. Suspense in the Sidney Sheldon tradition, where the sport that shows you everything hides what it does to the body.