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The Woman in the Third Floor Front
From a fractured life reinvented to a forgotten family history unearthed, these stories reveal the extraordinary in the everyday.
Discover a writer's accidental journey to self-discovery, a journalist's spiritual awakening in the wild, and a family's complex secrets spanning continents. From intimate moments to profound societal reflections, these stories illuminate resilience, the enduring power of memory, and the intricate connections that shape our lives. A captivating exploration of identity, love, and what it means to be human.
Discover a writer's accidental journey to self-discovery, a journalist's spiritual awakening in the wild, and a family's complex secrets spanning continents. From intimate moments to profound societal reflections, these stories illuminate resilience, the enduring power of memory, and the intricate connections that shape our lives. A captivating exploration of identity, love, and what it means to be human.
Kindle Edition
Published March 3, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 27, 2026
The title story in "The Woman in the Third Floor Front" is a tale of the Walking Wounded--in the central character's case, literally. Jack has a motorcycle accident while trying to hide his girlfriend from his wife. By the time he leaves the hospital, able to walk only with a cane, the wife has filed for divorce, and he has lost his job as a writer for an adventure magazine. In hopes of at least getting the job back, he decides to fly to the magazine's headquarters in South Carolina, only to be stalled in Indiana by an airlines strike. The only place he can find to stay is a residential hotel run by a young widow with a little boy who obviously needs a father, and who has a massage business on the side to meet the bills. Constance used to sing at Ellie's Bar & Grill on Friday nights, and music often tells where we are in the story, ranging from the record his wife plays to tell Jack she knows of his hanky-panky, to Constance's response to the Bar & Grill band's rendition of Jim Reeve's "He'll Have to Go" with its sequel, "He'll Have to Stay." The story ends with Jack at a South Carolina airport, trying to decide between a ticket back to Salt Lake City where he started, and one to Indiana where Constance waits (at the very least) to give him a massage.
The other stories in Scharine's book are divided into four groups: "Utah" (where the author has lived for many years), "Law and Order," "Past Lives," and "Close to Home." Each of the Utah stories begins with a reference to an actual historical incident, but whatever the context the effect on the characters is highly personal, touching on profession and politics, family and loss, racial acceptance and rejection, even sex and religion. "When I go, I leave no Trace" begins with a reporter's despair at right-wing greed and ends in a dream sequence with an environmental artist who disappeared ninety years ago. In "Chinaman's Chance" a woman descendant of a railroad tycoon meets the great-grandson of a Chinese laborer at the Intercontinental Railroad Centennial, while in "Stonewall Temple 1974," a veteran of New York City's first great gay uprising has a missionary encounter in a Salt Lake City motel named for the LDS Temple.
"Law and Order" has the only deliberately funny piece in "The Web and the Noir," in which a Humphrey Bogart-inspired private detective becomes romantically involved with a children's nursery rhyme. Truer to the genre, in "Last Job" a hired killer develops PTSD from the system that directs his occupation, and in "Scene of the Crime" a district attorney puts together the trifles which reveal a seeming accidental death to be a case of incest, murder, and suicide.
The "Past Lives" referred are apparently those of the author's family. In "Maria and Marta" the last words of a dying old woman will reveal fifty years later a story of life given and lives taken over two continents and two world wars. The writer pays tribute to his father in "Tough Guy," while in "That's the Way That Goes" a brother and sister comes to terms with a childhood guilt that has persisted to middle age.
The reader is literally "Close to Home" in the last section of the book, where in "Plainview" the author shows us an actual photograph of the children inside the one-room schoolhouse he attended, and acquaints us with the fates of some of them. In "The Man I Used To Be" and "Little Grey Fish" we learn of his relationship with his own children, while in "A Family Affair we are introduced not only to his grandchildren, but to the fact that each of them has dozens of brothers and sisters--many of whom they've met! The book ends with "I'll See You in My Dreams," as the reader accompanies the author as he passes through the house whose aura was defined by a multi-talented wife who in many ways is still present--a ghost who reassures rather than frightens.
Richard Scharine is a man who tills the span of his life like a field, never doubting that he will grow from the wisdom that he harvests. He believes that time is palimpsestic, that no matter how many layers with which we cover it, the past remains, patiently waiting to shine through when we least expect it.
If the field of Richard Scharine is not to your liking, perhaps you should till your own.
The other stories in Scharine's book are divided into four groups: "Utah" (where the author has lived for many years), "Law and Order," "Past Lives," and "Close to Home." Each of the Utah stories begins with a reference to an actual historical incident, but whatever the context the effect on the characters is highly personal, touching on profession and politics, family and loss, racial acceptance and rejection, even sex and religion. "When I go, I leave no Trace" begins with a reporter's despair at right-wing greed and ends in a dream sequence with an environmental artist who disappeared ninety years ago. In "Chinaman's Chance" a woman descendant of a railroad tycoon meets the great-grandson of a Chinese laborer at the Intercontinental Railroad Centennial, while in "Stonewall Temple 1974," a veteran of New York City's first great gay uprising has a missionary encounter in a Salt Lake City motel named for the LDS Temple.
"Law and Order" has the only deliberately funny piece in "The Web and the Noir," in which a Humphrey Bogart-inspired private detective becomes romantically involved with a children's nursery rhyme. Truer to the genre, in "Last Job" a hired killer develops PTSD from the system that directs his occupation, and in "Scene of the Crime" a district attorney puts together the trifles which reveal a seeming accidental death to be a case of incest, murder, and suicide.
The "Past Lives" referred are apparently those of the author's family. In "Maria and Marta" the last words of a dying old woman will reveal fifty years later a story of life given and lives taken over two continents and two world wars. The writer pays tribute to his father in "Tough Guy," while in "That's the Way That Goes" a brother and sister comes to terms with a childhood guilt that has persisted to middle age.
The reader is literally "Close to Home" in the last section of the book, where in "Plainview" the author shows us an actual photograph of the children inside the one-room schoolhouse he attended, and acquaints us with the fates of some of them. In "The Man I Used To Be" and "Little Grey Fish" we learn of his relationship with his own children, while in "A Family Affair we are introduced not only to his grandchildren, but to the fact that each of them has dozens of brothers and sisters--many of whom they've met! The book ends with "I'll See You in My Dreams," as the reader accompanies the author as he passes through the house whose aura was defined by a multi-talented wife who in many ways is still present--a ghost who reassures rather than frightens.
Richard Scharine is a man who tills the span of his life like a field, never doubting that he will grow from the wisdom that he harvests. He believes that time is palimpsestic, that no matter how many layers with which we cover it, the past remains, patiently waiting to shine through when we least expect it.
If the field of Richard Scharine is not to your liking, perhaps you should till your own.
March 14, 2026
Richard Scharine’s The Woman in the Third Floor Front is a story collection arranged in sections: Utah, Law and Order, Past Lives, and Close to Home, and it moves through romance, regional fiction, political reflection, memory, family, and elegy with unusual ease. The title story opens with Jack, hobbled after a motorcycle crash and freshly divorced, stumbling by chance into a stopover town where an airline delay, a widow who runs a hotel and massage business, and a child grieving his father turn accident into reprieve; elsewhere, the book ranges from a journalist’s reckoning with western land politics in “When I Go, I Leave No Trace” to intimate, family-centered pieces later in the volume that turn more openly autobiographical and reflective. What binds the collection is Scharine’s interest in people who are no longer where they thought they would be, yet are still trying, stubbornly, to make a livable meaning out of the remainder.
What I admired most was the book’s tonal confidence. Scharine is willing to let a story be earnest without turning syrupy, and willing to let intelligence arrive wearing ordinary clothes. In the title piece, music is not decoration but structure: standards and country songs keep surfacing as emotional evidence, almost like witness testimony, and by the time Constance answers “He’ll Have to Go” with “He’ll Have to Stay,” the scene has become both a small-town performance and a public act of choosing life again. I also liked the collection’s tolerance for crookedness, for wounded people, compromised people, people who embarrass themselves before they improve. Jack is not noble at the outset; that matters. The redemption here is not glossy. It limps. That gives the best stories a hard-earned warmth rather than a prefab glow.
Scharine sometimes overexplains a motive or theme just after dramatizing it well, and now and then the narration steps in with a teacherly finger raised when the scene has already done the work. But even that has a strange charm, because it feels continuous with the book’s larger personality: learned, conversational, unembarrassed by references to songs, politics, Shakespeare, journalism, and grief all sharing the same table. I came away feeling that the collection’s real subject is not plot but afterlife in the secular sense, the second act after divorce, bereavement, disillusionment, professional diminishment, or the long weathering of a place. Several later pieces deepen that feeling by turning toward kinship, memory, and haunting, making the book less a display case of separate stories than a cumulative meditation on what remains.
I’d recommend The Woman in the Third Floor Front to readers of literary fiction, short story collections, regional fiction, character-driven fiction, and contemporary historical fiction who like humane books with a little grain in the wood. Readers who admire the plainspoken emotional intelligence of Kent Haruf, or the way Elizabeth Strout lets ordinary lives carry uncommon weight, will probably find familiar pleasures here, though Scharine is more discursive and more musically inclined than either. This is a book for people who believe stories can be rueful, civic-minded, romantic, and haunted all at once.
What I admired most was the book’s tonal confidence. Scharine is willing to let a story be earnest without turning syrupy, and willing to let intelligence arrive wearing ordinary clothes. In the title piece, music is not decoration but structure: standards and country songs keep surfacing as emotional evidence, almost like witness testimony, and by the time Constance answers “He’ll Have to Go” with “He’ll Have to Stay,” the scene has become both a small-town performance and a public act of choosing life again. I also liked the collection’s tolerance for crookedness, for wounded people, compromised people, people who embarrass themselves before they improve. Jack is not noble at the outset; that matters. The redemption here is not glossy. It limps. That gives the best stories a hard-earned warmth rather than a prefab glow.
Scharine sometimes overexplains a motive or theme just after dramatizing it well, and now and then the narration steps in with a teacherly finger raised when the scene has already done the work. But even that has a strange charm, because it feels continuous with the book’s larger personality: learned, conversational, unembarrassed by references to songs, politics, Shakespeare, journalism, and grief all sharing the same table. I came away feeling that the collection’s real subject is not plot but afterlife in the secular sense, the second act after divorce, bereavement, disillusionment, professional diminishment, or the long weathering of a place. Several later pieces deepen that feeling by turning toward kinship, memory, and haunting, making the book less a display case of separate stories than a cumulative meditation on what remains.
I’d recommend The Woman in the Third Floor Front to readers of literary fiction, short story collections, regional fiction, character-driven fiction, and contemporary historical fiction who like humane books with a little grain in the wood. Readers who admire the plainspoken emotional intelligence of Kent Haruf, or the way Elizabeth Strout lets ordinary lives carry uncommon weight, will probably find familiar pleasures here, though Scharine is more discursive and more musically inclined than either. This is a book for people who believe stories can be rueful, civic-minded, romantic, and haunted all at once.
June 27, 2026
The Woman in the Third Floor Front is a beautifully crafted collection that reminds readers that the most extraordinary stories are often hidden within ordinary lives. Richard Scharine writes with remarkable sensitivity and insight, weaving together narratives that explore identity, memory, resilience, and the relationships that quietly shape who we become.
What impressed me most was the emotional depth running through each story. Whether uncovering forgotten family histories, reflecting on personal reinvention, or exploring moments of spiritual awakening, Scharine approaches every subject with compassion and authenticity. His writing invites readers to slow down, reflect, and appreciate the complexities that exist beneath the surface of everyday life.
Each piece feels complete on its own while contributing to a larger meditation on what it means to belong, to remember, and to continually rediscover ourselves. The transitions between personal experience, historical reflection, and universal themes are seamless, giving the collection a thoughtful rhythm that keeps readers engaged throughout.
The prose is elegant without being overly complicated, allowing the emotions and insights to take center stage. There is a quiet wisdom throughout the book that lingers long after the final page, encouraging readers to reflect on their own families, memories, and life journeys.
Readers who enjoy literary memoirs, reflective nonfiction, family histories, and thoughtful storytelling will find much to appreciate in this collection. It is both intellectually engaging and emotionally rewarding.
A memorable and beautifully written book that celebrates the enduring power of stories to connect us across generations and experiences.
What impressed me most was the emotional depth running through each story. Whether uncovering forgotten family histories, reflecting on personal reinvention, or exploring moments of spiritual awakening, Scharine approaches every subject with compassion and authenticity. His writing invites readers to slow down, reflect, and appreciate the complexities that exist beneath the surface of everyday life.
Each piece feels complete on its own while contributing to a larger meditation on what it means to belong, to remember, and to continually rediscover ourselves. The transitions between personal experience, historical reflection, and universal themes are seamless, giving the collection a thoughtful rhythm that keeps readers engaged throughout.
The prose is elegant without being overly complicated, allowing the emotions and insights to take center stage. There is a quiet wisdom throughout the book that lingers long after the final page, encouraging readers to reflect on their own families, memories, and life journeys.
Readers who enjoy literary memoirs, reflective nonfiction, family histories, and thoughtful storytelling will find much to appreciate in this collection. It is both intellectually engaging and emotionally rewarding.
A memorable and beautifully written book that celebrates the enduring power of stories to connect us across generations and experiences.
March 28, 2026
Richard Scharine managed to put together a collection of emotionally deep and uncanny short stories. While the first 3/4 of the woman and the third floor front are short stories concerned with topics around love, losing a job, being gay, even though being Mormon… the last part of the book contains autobiographic thoughts around his family, the past of his family, meaning: tax texts about his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents and how their family finally settled in the US from Europe. He also writes about his direct family his kids adopted and not, his sister, her marriage to a woman and their children.
I like reading it, although the last part was a bit less exciting. Don’t get me wrong, it was all interesting but rather boring, and it took me a while to read, as it was lacking the storytelling from the first parts.
I like reading it, although the last part was a bit less exciting. Don’t get me wrong, it was all interesting but rather boring, and it took me a while to read, as it was lacking the storytelling from the first parts.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews