This is a pretty solid collection of stories based around Alcatraz and I guess the reason it's ended up with a three star rating is due to the monotony in tone that's carried throughout the stories. They're all as hard and tough as the prison itself was and there just weren't enough stories that truly grabbed me.

The opening story "Break" by Glenn Gray is excellent and sets us up with what you'd expect from an Alcatraz collection with an ingenius escape plan. There are a few more of these types of stories, but there's plenty madness here too with Whitey Bulger LSD experiments, cyanide filled millipedes, banjo picking Al Capone, The Birdman and Johnny Cash coming to play.

My favourite story was very much of a different flavour in Rory Costello's "The Sympathizers" which recounts the tale of Confederate sympathizers speaking ill of Abe Lincoln following his assassination and being decreed to be forced labour at Alcatraz. It offered up lots I didn't know about whereas other stories hit upon the well worn myths of the prison.

"The Eighth" by Johnny Shaw was the other tale that I really enjoyed about the wife of an inmate coming to visit her husband on the eighth of each month.