This one really should have been left in the laundry basket.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Ian McEwan. “Atonement” is one of my favorite books. But this… that it’s even by the same writer as that or other excellent books like “Amsterdam” is baffling.

I picked this up while visiting Dublin. There’s a fantastic used bookstore there, maybe the best I’ve ever been to, called “Chapters”. While spending my vacation browsing its shelves my eyes fell on this collection of short stories.

I was surprised that I’d never heard of this collection before – though no longer – and based on the title and the cover, which features a nude woman lying, appropriately enough, between the sheets, I added it to the already meter high stack I was lugging around.

This was supposed to be a sexy read and that alone made me bypass many of the other no doubt excellent books I brought back from that excellent bookstore to read this one first.

Let’s hope I have better luck with the rest.

Nothing about this is sexy at all. It’s a collection of mostly kinky stories that utterly fail to intrigue. I'm thinking of the father in the title story and his incestuous feelings for his young daughter and his regularly gross sexual feelings for her similarly young friend. But it wasn’t the content of the story that turned me off, but the execution.

Nothing here is especially well-written. It’s all very early McEwan and these feel like pages that should have stayed in the wastebasket.

Am I alone in feeling that way?

Disenchanted as I was at numerous occasions, I turned this book around to read, with some amazement, the gushing blurbs from the likes of the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers you’d recognize.

“Is all that praise about this book?” I wondered to myself. I find it more likely that such adulation came from reviews of McEwan’s greater body of work because here he was clearly having an off day.

Reading, then skimming, “In Between the Sheets” confirms that some things really are better left unexposed.