M. Boutflower – författare

Jane Chambre inherits the family gift of second sight; she can view 'remotely'. Her nephew has eloped with Rosalba d'Avaray, who is related to Madame de Montespan. Jane's interest in the 'Affaire des poisons' leads to a modern laboratory and a bottle of graphene oxide labelled 'GRAFFIEND' by hand, the hand of the dead man holding it. A second man at the laboratory has thrown himself off the Acropolis while on holiday...

A man inherits a metal shoe from his grandfather a fisherman - a metal stiletto to 'spin' with in his lake. When it cuts from the cheek of a local man, caught in broad daylight, he will fish only at night for the Lady of the Lake, who now writes in thin air for him to read her leather fingers like expressive lips. The book in your hands is therefore a collaboration.

The philosopher Socrates was said to be a 'mosaic cutter'. This was because of the hemlock in his body; it worked its way up, feet first, until he could no longer report on the progress of its lethal effect. In our Classical past the last piece of a mosaic was inserted loose so that the mosaic cutter could leave via its 'trap door'. We would call it a portal. The author of The Mosaic Cutter discovers a piece of skull bone, dyed black, in with the other pieces he buys online in a sack 'loosely tied at the neck.' Will the 'one previous owner' of it make himself known?

The daughter of a vicar from Ashbourne in England, Eleanor Jourdain had been walking down a grass path between trees in the park of Versailles in 1902, when she heard French voices in animated conversation behind her. She turns to see nodbody, but as the group closes on her, she feels her 'room being taken up by a woman talking in old French'. Who was this woman she grows to look like, who would appear to her dressed in white?

If the manuscript for 'The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies' was found in a drawer, left by the author Robert Kirk at his death then a similar doscovery made post mortem in a locked drawer is behind the publication of 'The Wit's End'. This book was very nearly never published 'due to the ill-fit of an old key with broken teeth.' The drawer it was forced, had to be, and writing in a late elf's hand duly found.

Millais, the artist who painted Ophelia, did so in two stages. He paints his model in a bath, then in a river in which Ophelia drowns outdoors on her own. He complains as does the author of this book, that he feels he was followed home by her, dead Ophelia.

The Revereand Walker is known as the plague doctor; he wears red laces on his skates if someone dies of 'the plague'. He reads the future, ours, in the stratches he makes on the ice. They all point in one direction: 'it (the plague) is the Devil's work...' A devil in a medical-looking coat.