A two-book anthology of female-led crime and depravity opens with Laurence Byrne-Claybourne's "The Terms of Her Will".

Read on as Mr Claybourne describes the fall from grace of a petrified adolescent in his forties whose deceased Isle of Mull based aunt has determined will become useful to society. An outcome she assures by leaving a Last Will and Testament ensuring her feckless and greedy nephew will need to re-locate from London to live in his late-aunt's Tobermory home for the next five-years... Five-years he will spend jumping through the domestic hoops of that aunt's young Polish housekeeper and the fiftysomething female solicitor his behaviour must satisfy if he is to receive the benefits of his aunt's estate at the end of his residency... Domestic hoops that will border on the illegal and ensure a very different man emerges at the end of those five years.

The second of our tales is Sydne Albright's "Venus in Norfolk", her description of how a schoolgirl and shared undergrad fantasy is made real after a friend from university visits her former confidante at her Norfolk home to escape an unhappy marriage back in the States and finds that shared fantasy is no longer confined to the imagination... At least not if the story her friend and hostess weaves for her turns out to be true and the guest she insists resides in her basement is more than simple wish fulfilment and an invention of the imagination... A possibility the troubled and soon-to-be-divorced guest finds incredibly exciting despite her incredulity... Incredulity that is about to be contradicted in the most shocking and satisfying of ways!

Female-led fiction of a decadent and psychological nature for those readers who prefer to use their imaginations with the help of character-driven narratives and believable plotlines.