Complete and unabridged, with 59 full-page plates by Marianne North, Christopher Williams and John Kelt Edwards. Fourteen stories from Collins's late years: a dead man's photograph, a nurse who sees what is coming, a marriage annulled by Scottish law, a mesmerist. He invented the detective novel with The Moonstone, worked deep in laudanum for the last twenty years, and kept two households without marrying either woman. These are the short, sharp pieces from the end — machinery stripped down to what makes it turn. Fifty-nine plates by painters including Tissot and Grimshaw, from river scenes and harbour lights to parting glances, catch the chance encounters and quiet partings these stories turn on.