Duet-Five in the "Diabolical Duets" collection brings us two tales of men on desperate times who fall to domestic-service in the home of the "Diabolical" female.

Read on, as Ms Rachilde's "Manservant" describes the fall from grace of a dissolute English gentleman in the 1920's. A man wholly out of options. This after his inheritance has been squandered and his debts ? including one to a vengeful and homicidal underworld figure - have become unsustainable... Which is the very point when he receives an offer from a solicitor and friend... An offer giving him the "Opportunity" to become the full-time live-in house-man to a trio of financially sound and genteel ladies with very specific "romantic" takes.

We finish with Sandrine Bessancort's "The Servant Revisited", her tale of how a destitute one-time golden-boy from a poverty-stricken Russian village attempts to find his fortune in Moscow at the beginning of the twentieth-century... Doing so to find success elusive and only failure and hunger awaiting him... Before, that is, dispirited and at his lowest ebb, he finds ? unbelievably ? what had been his true calling all along in the home of a woman from his former village... A young woman and widow with a an opening for a particularly servile and attentive retainer!

2-Believable and fantasy female-led tales of an early kind of feminism 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.