Every now and then, you can discern a sinister hint of David Lynch.
Then a sinister hint appears when she takes coffee for breakfast, even though in her letters she had told him she was a tea-drinker.
And the cover image of the White House looks sinister enough to hint at a pornographic murder in the president's bedroom, in homage to David Baldacci's "Absolute Power" (an unfortunate landmark of this genre), at the very least.
The kiddie humour, the sinister bent, the hint of wish-fulfilment, all come through straight away in the opening story, "Pigtails, Ltd", about Miss Rawlings who collects little girls.
They would look great in an overrun garden, hinting at sinister secret cults.
Richardson projected a personality unique in the British theatre, one that was charming and refined, but also mischievous and capable of hinting at sinister or tragic depths in the characters he played.
His toolbox is that of a reporter turned crime writer: he sets up every scene with descriptions of interiors or landscape and with staccato portraits of the main characters, which invariably hint at sinister events to come.
Displaying her only real Achilles' heel, Ms. Rowling starts the book with a sinister, tacked-on prologue hinting at the whereabouts of evil Lord Voldemort, who is the Darth Vader of this enterprise and is so wicked that others fearfully refer to him as "You-Know-Who".
Green played the clumsy district attorney in a bad court-room melodrama, accusing him of concealing his religious identity and hinting at sinister intrigue.
Yet there are also oblique hints of more sinister processes at work.
Rolling along the back roads and highways of the Internet, a picture of a poster hints faintly at sinister doings underground.
