2-Fantasies of life as it's lived in the female-led, open with Elliot Freund's cautionary classic, "Between a Rock and a Hard-Face".

Read on, as a philandering, dishonest, and recently divorced, forty-something Los Angeleno loses heavily during a drunken poker game and sees his life change even more for the worse. For the man he owes is a vicious and ruthless crystal-meth supplier who leaves no unpaid debt unavenged. A terrifying prospect that leads the former man-about-town and womanizer to accept the offer of help made to him by the female friend of his former wife that will see him transplanted to another continent and lead to his becoming little more than the indentured American of both his wife's friend and the Indian family into whom she herself has just married... Service vouched for by the crystal-meth dealer himself!

Next we have Rafael Menton's "Futaba Namakura-San", in which disaster looms after a faithless English business owner, with a loving wife and daughter - and a penchant for other women along with a gambling addiction - loses a huge sum of money. A sum he can't raise he has lost to a Japanese man in a private game of poker at a London casino. Though it will not be the man himself who sets out to recover the debt. Rather it will be the younger wife of the man - a man with underworld connections in the UK, mainland Europe and Japan itself - who sets about having that debt paid... A wife and accountant who has some very specific ideas as to how the handsome Englishman will pay off his debt of honour.

Believable fantasy and misadventure in the world of female-led fiction, for those readers with a desire to have a light shone on the more... outré ...corners of their imaginations.