Dilston Press – förlag

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.

A man utters the safeword known only to his sexual partner and finds himself in conversation with a French woman with her name from both their pasts. The book in your hands, the information within it, owes its existence in total to the repeated utterance of this single word XXXXX. A prosaic crime novel.

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?

A glassblower, from Murano, inhales the spirit of the former owner of the mirror he is recycling. Having first identified herself as 'Andromeda', she would have him disinter her on her birthday. He is found hanging from a light fitting in Genoa.

A man happens upon the natural setting for a group portrait, a fete galante, in the park of Versailles. He falls asleep by a waterfall. A woman in a gold dress she feels for a pulse his to discover if he is equally real.

A gondolier is hired by the municipal authority to sing what is unseen into the spectrum of visible light. He was not told at what point he is to stop. The author, a poor singer from birth, he is hired to reverse the ill-effect, to return Pandora's belongings to her box.

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.

The only birds at Calke Abbey are of the stuffed variety. Glass filled with long-dead birds line the walls. Their beaks are wired shut. An expert in texidermy is sumoned to the abbey; he is to find an exploration for the dawn chorus heard by the first tourists.

English is the language of literary devices. From Miranda in the play 'The Tempest' to Peter Pan, nothing is as it reads. A relative of Lewis Carroll, the author reveals a hidden world of cloak and daggers in a political Alice, and the congenital liar in 'Great Expctations', a Roman Pip. This is history as you were never taught at school.

More high brow, erotic fiction from the quill of Madame de Morville.

A man falls asleep in a cave much like Plato's original. The world is no longer recognizable when he awakes with a Neolothic stick in his hand.

A man bids for a walking stick once owned by Toulouse-Lautrec. He will unscrew the handle of the stick, only to find a note left in the hollow of it thanking him for releasing the Green Fairy, 'Absinthe', back into the world at large. At first a blur in the periphery of his vision, she grows physical limbs in helping him solve, then avenge a murder.

A man places an advertisement in a magazine for people who believe they have lived before - in his case as a horse. A woman in a riding habit with a memory of him as her horse, replies overnight.

A man who sells eyepatches to the visually impaired, the blind, finds he has a second market for his patches: men whose possession shows in one eye only.

In Florence, when Savonarola had his bonfire of the vanities, it was noted that characters from burnt books would be seen walking the streets at night. Now with the 'scraping' of a book's contents by A.I, this same phenomenon is being observed, only in daylight

The title is that given by James Gillray, the caricaturist, to three members of the Mathew family. Little did he know at the time that their French au pair, an innocent abroad in Ireland, would be burnt as a witch in 1830 by Francis Mathew. He thought her Sycorax, Shakespeare's witch?