Female Corpses in Crime Fiction

Female Corpses in Crime Fiction
Author: Glen S. Close
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2018-10-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 3319990136

This book examines the central significance of sexualized female corpses in modern and contemporary Hispanic and Anglophone crime fiction. Beginning with the foundational detective fictions of the nineteenth century, it draws from diverse subgenres to describe a transatlantic tradition of necropornography characterized by lascivious interest in female cadavers, dissection, morgues, femicide, and snuff movies. Hard-boiled and police procedural classics from the U.S. and the U.K. are juxtaposed with texts by established Spanish and Spanish American genre masters and with obscure works that prefigure the contemporary transmedial boom in corpse-centered fictions. The rhetoric and aesthetics of necropornographic crime fiction are related to those of popular crime journalism and forensic-science television dramas. This study argues that crime fiction has long fixated disproportionately on the corpses of beautiful young white women and continues to treat their deaths and autopsies as occasions for male visual pleasure, male subjective self-affirmation and male homosocial bonding.

Woman of the Dead

Woman of the Dead
Author: Bernhard Aichner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2015-08-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1476775613

A grieving widow and professional mortician discovers there was more to the hit-and-run accident that took her husband's life than she originally thought, and vows to find out and get revenge on those responsible.

Talking to the Dead

Talking to the Dead
Author: Harry Bingham
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2012-09-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0345533747

A mesmerizing and thrilling novel—perfect for fans of Tana French and Stieg Larsson—that introduces a modern, unforgettable rookie cop whose past is as fascinating and as deadly as the crimes she investigates. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Boston Globe • The Seattle Times SHE KNOWS WHAT IT’S LIKE. . . . At first, the murder scene appears sad, but not unusual: a young woman undone by drugs and prostitution, her six-year-old daughter dead alongside her. But then detectives find a strange piece of evidence in the squalid house: the platinum credit card of a very wealthy—and long dead—steel tycoon. What is a heroin-addicted hooker doing with the credit card of a well-known and powerful man who died months ago? This is the question that the most junior member of the investigative team, Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths, is assigned to answer. But D.C. Griffiths is no ordinary cop. She’s earned a reputation at police headquarters in Cardiff, Wales, for being odd, for not picking up on social cues, for being a little overintense. And there’s that gap in her past, the two-year hiatus that everyone assumes was a breakdown. But Fiona is a crack investigator, quick and intuitive. She is immediately drawn to the crime scene, and to the tragic face of the six-year-old girl, who she is certain has something to tell her . . . something that will break the case wide open. Ignoring orders and protocol, Fiona begins to explore far beyond the rich man’s credit card and into the secrets of her seaside city. And when she uncovers another dead prostitute, Fiona knows that she’s only begun to scratch the surface of a dark world of crime and murder. But the deeper she digs, the more danger she risks—not just from criminals and killers but from her own past . . . and the abyss that threatens to pull her back at any time. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Harry Bingham's Love Story, with Murders. Praise for Talking to the Dead “Gritty, compelling . . . a procedural unlike any other you are likely to read this year.”—USA Today “With Detective Constable Fiona ‘Fi’ Griffiths, Harry Bingham . . . finds a sweet spot in crime fiction . . . think Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander . . . Denise Mina’s ‘Paddy’ Meehan [or] Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. . . . The writing is terrific.”—The Boston Globe “The mystery-thriller genre is already so staffed with masterminds that it’s hard to make room for another. But along comes a book like Talking to the Dead, and suddenly an unadvertised opening is filled. . . . [This] has the feel of something fresh and compelling.”—New York Daily News “A stunner with precision plotting, an unusual setting, and a deeply complex protagonist . . . We have the welcome promise of more books to come about Griffiths.”—The Seattle Times “Recommended highly . . . [a] riveting procedural thriller.”—Library Journal (starred review)

The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime

The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime
Author: Michael Sims
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2011-01-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101486171

A wonderfully wicked new anthology from the editor of The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime It is the Victorian era and society is both entranced by and fearful of that suspicious character known as the New Woman. She rides those new- fangled bicycles and doesn't like to be told what to do. And, in crime fiction, such female detectives as Loveday Brooke, Dorcas Dene, and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard are out there shadowing suspects, crawling through secret passages, fingerprinting corpses, and sometimes committing a lesser crime in order to solve a murder. In The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, Michael Sims has brought together all of the era's great crime-fighting females- plus a few choice crooks, including Four Square Jane and the Sorceress of the Strand.

Saint X

Saint X
Author: Alexis Schaitkin
Publisher: Celadon Books
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2020-02-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250219582

A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 "'Saint X' is hypnotic. Schaitkin's characters...are so intelligent and distinctive it feels not just easy, but necessary, to follow them. I devoured [it] in a day." –Oyinkan Braithwaite, New York Times Book Review When you lose the person who is most essential to you, who do you become? Recommended by Entertainment Weekly, included in Good Morning America's 20 Books We're Excited for in 2020 & named as one of Vogue's Best Books to Read This Winter, Bustle's Most Anticipated Books of February 2020, and O Magazine's 14 of the Best Books to Read This February! Hailed as a “marvel of a book” and “brilliant and unflinching,” Alexis Schaitkin’s stunning debut, Saint X, is a haunting portrait of grief, obsession, and the bond between two sisters never truly given the chance to know one another. Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison’s body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men–employees at the resort–are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. The story turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only the return home to broken lives. Years later, Claire is living and working in New York City when a brief but fateful encounter brings her together with Clive Richardson, one of the men originally suspected of murdering her sister. It is a moment that sets Claire on an obsessive pursuit of the truth–not only to find out what happened the night of Alison’s death but also to answer the elusive question: Who exactly was her sister? At seven, Claire had been barely old enough to know her: a beautiful, changeable, provocative girl of eighteen at a turbulent moment of identity formation. As Claire doggedly shadows Clive, hoping to gain his trust, waiting for the slip that will reveal the truth, an unlikely attachment develops between them, two people whose lives were forever marked by the same tragedy. For readers of Emma Cline’s The Girls and Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, Saint X is a flawlessly drawn and deeply moving story that culminates in an emotionally powerful ending.

Mistress of the Art of Death

Mistress of the Art of Death
Author: Ariana Franklin
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2007-02-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101206756

The national bestselling hit hailed by the New York Times as a "vibrant medieval mystery...[it] outdoes the competition." In medieval Cambridge, England, Adelia, a female forensics expert, is summoned by King Henry II to investigate a series of gruesome murders that has wrongly implicated the Jewish population, yielding even more tragic results. As Adelia's investigation takes her behind the closed doors of the country's churches, the killer prepares to strike again.

The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction

The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction
Author: Jesper Gulddal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2022-04-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108605354

Accessible yet comprehensive, this first systematic account of crime fiction across the globe offers a deep and thoroughly nuanced understanding of the genre's transnational history. Offering a lucid account of the major theoretical issues and comparative perspectives that constitute world crime fiction, this book introduces readers to the international crime fiction publishing industry, the translation and circulation of crime fiction, international crime fiction collections, the role of women in world crime fiction, and regional forms of crime fiction. It also illuminates the past and present of crime fiction in various supranational regions across the world, including East and South Asia, the Arab World, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Scandinavia, as well as three spheres defined by a shared language, namely the Francophone, Lusophone, and Hispanic worlds. Thoroughly-researched and broad in scope, this book is as valuable for general readers as for undergraduate and postgraduate students of popular fiction and world literature.

The Woman on the Windowsill

The Woman on the Windowsill
Author: Sylvia Sellers-Garcia
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2020-02-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300252358

A true story of violence and punishment that illuminates a transformative moment in Guatemalan history On the morning of July 1, 1800, a surveyor and mapmaker named Cayetano Díaz opened the window of his study in Guatemala City to find a horrific sight: a pair of severed breasts. Offering a meticulously researched and evocative account of the quest to find the perpetrator and understand the motives behind such a brutal act, this volume pinpoints the sensational crime as a watershed moment in Guatemalan history that radically changed the nature of justice and the established social order. Sylvia Sellers-García reveals how this bizarre and macabre event spurred an increased attention to crime that resulted in more forceful policing and reflected important policy decisions not only in Guatemala but across Latin America. This fascinating book is both an engaging criminal case study and a broader consideration of the forces shaping Guatemala City at the brink of the modern era.

Transnational Crime Fiction

Transnational Crime Fiction
Author: Maarit Piipponen
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2020-10-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030534138

Focusing on contemporary crime narratives from different parts of the world, this collection of essays explores the mobility of crimes, criminals and investigators across social, cultural and national borders. The essays argue that such border crossings reflect on recent sociocultural transformations and geopolitical anxieties to create an image of networked and interconnected societies where crime is not easily contained. The book further analyses crime texts’ wider sociocultural and affective significance by examining the global mobility of the genre itself across cultures, languages and media. Underlining the global reach and mobility of the crime genre, the collection analyses types and representations of mobility in literary and visual crime narratives, inviting comparisons between texts, crimes and mobilities in a geographically diverse context. The collection ultimately understands mobility as an object of study and a critical lens through which transformations in our globalised world can be examined.

Subverting Sex, Gender, and Genre in Cuban and Mexican Detective Fiction

Subverting Sex, Gender, and Genre in Cuban and Mexican Detective Fiction
Author: Ailsa Peate
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2024-09-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1837645256

The presence of bodies and sex in detective fiction has been a long-term feature of this internationally popular genre. Titillation is at the centre of narratives reliant upon discovery and revelation: motives and criminals are slowly revealed, along with sexualized and violated bodies – from femmes fatales to the corpses of victims. A satisfying, gratifying genre for its readership, the detective novel promises the disruption and subsequent restoration of order in societies tarnished by disillusionment which hope for a better future. This book takes as its focus examples of detective fiction from Cuba and Mexico during or in the aftermath of huge social upheaval (the Special Period and the War on Drugs), analyzing representations of sexualities, bodies, and the genre itself. Through an investigation of novels by Leonardo Padura and Amir Valle of Cuba, and Bef and Rogelio Guedea of Mexico, this work investigates increasingly fluid sexualities and bodies in challenging examples of metaphysical detective fiction, a particularly anxious subgenre which challenges both the structures and limits of the detective novel and the reader’s understanding of true and false and right and wrong, representative of troubling periods of severe social disruption for Cuba and Mexico.