Detecting Women: a Readers Guide and Checklist for Mystery Series Written by Women

A reference guide to mystery fiction

The number of women writing mysteries continues to grow, as this volume attests. Following up on the success of Detecting Women (1995) and Detecting Women 2 [RBB Jl 96] (which Bleiler calls "a monumental achievement)," the guide now covers approximately 4,000 titles in 815 mystery series written by 690 women who were alive in 1998. Alphabetically arranged author entries are provided in the "Master List," each including a brief overview and a list of series characters and titles. The 225 authors who are new to this edition are identified; they include Ann Livesay, a geologist whose series is set in such exotic locales as the Amazon and the Great Barrier Reef; Sujata Massey, whose award-winning first novel, The Salaryman's Wife (1997), introduced a series featuring a Japanese American antiques dealer; and Caroline Rowe, whose detective is a "1350s blind physician and bishop" in Spain. Information is quite current, even covering some new books and series planned for 2000 and 2001, although Ruth Rendell's 1999 Inspector Wexford mystery Harm Done is not here.

The Master List is followed by indexes of mystery types, characters, and settings. A title chronology groups books by publication year, beginning in the 1940s. There are also an alphabetical list of titles, a guide to pseudonyms, a list of awards, a bibliography, and a general index. Appendixes list authors who were dropped (primarily because they have died) and titles that have been eliminated because they are not part of a series or were never published, among other reasons. This volume provides the most comprehensive coverage by far of contemporary women mystery writers. A companion, Detecting Men, was published in 1998 [RBB Ap 15 98].
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