Detecting Women Pocket Guide: Checklist for Mystery Series Written by Women

Willetta L. Heising's Detecting Women Pocket Guide (3rd edition) quickly insinuates itself into your reading life. Like a dictionary in a heated Scrabble game, its one of the first things to pull out of your purse or pocket when you enter a bookstore, get into a conversation about mystery novels, sit down to make a gift list (or a want list), or need to check any number of quick facts about your favorite author or novel. As a companion to the big reference work Detecting Women (and like its award-winning male counterpart, Detecting Men Pocket Guide, companion to Detecting Men), the book contains the essentials for the mystery traveler. The guide is organized alphabetically by author name, and then by each series character underneath. The books in each series are subsequently arranged by publication date and are followed by a white star for an award nomination and a black star for an award. In front of each listing are two check boxes to mark when purchasing, then reading, the book. While the Pocket Guide does not have all the biographical information and reference tools of the big book, it wouldn't fit in your pocket if it did. Nonetheless, Heising has crammed in 3,700 titles from over 800 series, and has added 200 new authors since the last edition. She even has several listings from not-yet-published books, and she has left blanks for collectors to fill in their own additions later on. If you are a serious reader of mysteries or a new fan of the genre, the Detecting Women Pocket Guide will prove an invaluable discovery machine for new authors and books and a ready reference when an acquisition is in hand. --Patrick O'Kelley