A Journey to Disgrace... Plus - 2

3-Antique and female-led descents - for the male-gender, anyway - open with Kurt Steiner's "A Journey to Disgrace", as we take another trip back to the beginning of the last century to witness the abject fate of a wealthy and recently divorced man. A man taking a voyage to the East to put his cares behind him. Only to find he has placed himself directly in the firing line of an Indian stepmother and stepdaughter among his fellow passengers.
A beauteous and assertive stepmother and a stepdaughter who, though falling a long way from the description of "beautiful", is at least the mother's equal when it comes to evil. This is followed by Sandrine Bessancort's "A Scandal in Bohemia Revisited", and her re-imagining of a Sherlock Holmes we have not been shown before. A man and Victorian detective of great intellect who has proved, until now, emotionally impervious to the all too human emotion of passion and is about to experience it for the very first time.
And with a power altogether too much for a man unused to such... NEED. We complete the triad with Rafe Linnell's "Madame Solange", as the lives of two friends in a sleepy English village between the wars are turned on their heads when one of them confesses to a murder he committed while living in Paris. A murder committed at the behest of an evil, mesmeric, and erotically warped landlady whose clutches he subsequently escaped by returning to England.
A demonic and sexually controlling landlady for whom nothing matters but the control that slakes her warped thirst. Control she is determined to exercise over the handsome Englishman once again now she has found him. 3-Believable and fantasy female-led tales of early kind of feminism and human and occult bondage - written in the style of the early 20th Century masters of the genre - for the reader who enjoys having the imagination tweaked rather than bludgeoned.