Book-One of the "Rocks and Hard-Places" collection features two works of female-led crime and depravity from Shauna Willets and Elliot Freund.

Ms Willets opens the volume with "Venus Ascendant", her tale of a serial castrator on the loose in the English Home-Counties and a female detective's struggle to find the 'perp' before the latest in a line of butchered and unmanned victims is chosen... Her race against the clock hampered by her own lecherous superior and a troubled private-life that has not been made any smoother by the removal from it of her mystified husband and the young son she loves.

This is followed by Mr Freund's "Between a Rock and a Hard-Face", in which a feckless and divorced Los Angeles man, reduced to living in a trailer-park, loses a sum of money he can't afford to pay in a card-game... Money he has lost to a vengeful crystal-meth dealer who will end his life unless his marker is honoured... Which is when a friend of his ex-wife - now married to a former employee who once worked under the ex-husband at the company owned by his father-in-law - steps in with an offer for him that will see him dead if he refuses it.

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