Women on the Case
Stories
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A brilliant collection of 26 original stories from the best women crime writers of our times, introduced and edited by Sara Paretsky
From wicked irony and white-collar crime in Amanda Cross’s “The Baroness,” to the chilling “Only A woman,” Algerian writer Amel Benaboura’s English-language debut, here are voices known and unknown at home and abroad, as familiar crime turf in America and England is expanded to Russia, Algeria, Austria, Germany, and South America.
From Ruth Rendell’s lovelorn secretary to Eleanor Taylor Bland’s Asian-African college professor, the women characters in these tales are girlfriends who collaborate to catch a thief . . . or get away with murder; P.I.s who keep guns in their handbags . . . or their bras; crime victims, homeless, women, or housewives whose ordinary lives take a brutal, sometimes fatal twist. But in each case, a master storyteller has created new, powerful fiction that plumbs the depth and breadth of a woman’s art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her introduction to a collection that endorses good politics at least as much as good storytelling, Paretsky tackles the thorny issue of ``what if anything I am doing to acknowledge my duty to other women writers, and to the suffering of women in my own age.'' Fortunately, many entries satisfy both agendas admirably. In Nancy Pickard's "A Rock and a Hard Place," a woman who was raped and shot dreads further violence and hires a PI to prevent three murders that could be imminent. Frances Fyfield hints that some cultural differences can be deadly in ``Nothing to Lose,'' in which an Englishwoman marries a West African and soon begins contemplating his ``lovely funeral.'' One of a few entries in translation, ``Saturday Night Fever'' by Viennese writer Helga Anderle, trails a journalist the night she stumbles on a murder that demands she choose between career and conscience. Less rewarding is Ruth Rendell's ``Astronomical Scarf,'' which follows a scarf from owner to owner and in which Rendell's habitual delicious darkness takes a backseat to mere cleverness. The leadoff story, P.M. Carlson's ``Parties Unknown by the Jury,'' sets the tone of the book: in 1892, a white stage actress finds herself a witness to a Memphis lynching and comes upon Ida Wells at the dawn of her journalism career. Wells, as a woman who writes her way toward equality, is clearly intended as a guiding spirit of this purposeful collection.
