Duet-Two in the "Diabolical Duets" collection brings us another two tales of female-led fantasy, suspense, and possession.

First up is Terence Lloyd-Harding's, "His Beaten Path"; a female-led tale of how fantasy interacts with reality and vice-versa, as a City trader and former Dulwich College pupil wanders from the rural tranquillity of his Cornish walking-holiday onto a less beaten path that will certainly live up to the latter half of that description when he sees a sign for a village not mentioned on any of his maps.

A sign, Vincent Carrick learns, that can only be seen by certain people and leads to a village by the name of "Croix de Besançon"... A village run and governed by the iron-hand of women descended from the exodus made by Huguenot's centuries before... And a place he will soon wish he had NEVER laid eyes upon!

We end with Rafael Menton's "The Veil of Silk", and his tale of a jaded English businessman who, looking for an escape to the East-Coast of England, finds himself in an out-of-the-way, strange, small, and highly delightful, Suffolk fishing village... A delightful fishing village, he soon learns, that is presided over by a mature and somewhat dictatorial French woman and the equally assertive women sharing her home... Women who prefer their men obedient and obsequious... And especially their large and formidable Caribbean housekeeper, who, it seems, has taken a rather peculiar liking to him!

2-Believable fantasy female-led tales of occult possession and human bondage in the style of the early 20th Century masters of the genre, for the reader who enjoys having the imagination tweaked rather than bludgeoned.