Venus Ascendant... Plus-1

A two-book anthology of female-led crime and depravity opens with Shauna Willets' "Venus Ascendant", her 2004 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 vengeful and 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… A troubled private life that will be made no less complicated by the introduction to it of a handsome criminal profiler.

This is followed by Laurence Byrne-Claybourne's "The Terms of Her Will", and 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.

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