Like his characters, Mr. Murray, who trained as a doctor before he became a teaching-writing fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop, has a fascination with detail, with the tiny, distinguishing specifics that can reveal a person's mood, presage an illness or define a place. Many of his people in A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies focus on details as a way of achieving detachment, but in Mr. Murray's case, his orchestration of psychological and physical details results in stories that are as affecting as they are suspenseful. The best of these tales combine the narrative tension of an old-fashioned yarn with the emotional density of Alice Munro's fiction, compressing entire lives into a handful of pages while exposing the secrets and nightmares that connect one family member to another