'The hand moved ...an awful, brooding, vengeful presence was hidden within the smiling doll -- a sinister spirit from behind the veil, swift and relentless in its message of doom.' The twelve mystery stories in this collection relate inexplicable episodes of madness and revenge, terror and obsession, the grotesque and the arabesque, the scientific and the supernatural. Sometimes we find ghosts or other phantoms at the heart of the mystery, but in other cases eerie incidents arise out of apparently everyday situations and these ordinary origins make the uncanniness even more chilling. Jack Adrian brings together stories by well-known writers in the crime and mystery genre, such as Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle, and rarer stories which have for decades been unavailable to readers.