2-Works of mystery, obsession, and dependence open with |Theo Hopcraft's "The Pawnbroker".

Read of what happens after a sailor sells a much sought-after diamond to a dealer trading on the Liverpool docks, A sailor who, after the sale is completed, gives a warning to the pawnbroker which, in his greed, he neglects to heed... Neglect that will see both his assistant and senior partner die before him in the most dreadful of ways... Neglect ensuring the pawnbroker will come face to face with the Subcontinent man to whom the diamond belongs... A man who insists he has no intention of killing him... Though the broker will come to wish that he had!

This is followed by Sandrine Bessancort's "The Servant Revisited", her tale of how a destitute one-time golden-boy from a poverty-stricken Russian village attempts to find his fortune in Moscow at the beginning of the 20th-century... Only to find failure and hunger awaiting him... Before, that is, dispirited and at his lowest ebb, he finds ? unbelievably ? what had been his true calling all along in home of a woman from his former village... A young woman and widow with a an opening for a particularly servile and attentive retainer!

Believable escapist fantasy, for those readers with a desire to have a light shone on the more... outré ...corners of their imaginations.