Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s popular crime series, written in Spanish and organized around the exploits of Police Inspector Petra Delicado and Deputy Inspector Fermin Garzon, is arguably the most successful detective series published in Spain during the previous three decades. Nina L. Molinaro examines the tensions between the rhetoric of gender differences espoused by the woman detective and the orthodox ideology of the police procedural. She argues that even as the series incorporates gender differences into the crime series formula, it does so in order to correct women, naturalize men’s authority, sanction social hierarchies, and assuage collective anxieties. As Molinaro shows, with the exception of the protagonist, the women characters require constant surveillance and modification, often as a result of men’s supposedly intrinsic protectiveness or excessive sexuality. Men, by contrast, circulate more freely in the fictional world and are intrinsic to the political, psychological, and economic prosperity of their communities. Molinaro situates her discussion in Petra Delicado’s contemporary Spain of dog owners, ¡Hola!, Russian cults, and gated communities.

Petra Delicado, a Barcelona police inspector assigned to a desk job, returns to the homicide department to investigate the rapes of young girls by a serial rapist who only leaves a circular mark on his victims' forearms.

Alicia Giménez Bartlett's popular crime series, organized around the exploits of Police Inspector Petra Delicado and Deputy Inspector Fermín Garzón, is arguably the most successful detective series in Spain of the last three decades. Nina L. Molinaro examines the tensions between the rhetoric of gender differences espoused by the woman detective and the orthodox ideology of the police procedural, and she situates her discussion in Petra Delicado's contemporary Spain of dog owners, ¡Hola!, Russian cults, and gated communities.

"A mongrel dog named Freaky, the corpse of a man with a seemingly endless list of aliases, and a handful of tips from an anonymous woman caller. With these elements hard-nosed Inspector Petra Delicado and her sentimental sidekick, Fermin Garzon, begin an investigation into big-money dog smuggling. Their best leads come from the most unlikely sources: a ruggedly handsome vet; a blond bombshell who trains guard dogs; an eccentric university professor; and a haughty dog groomer. At times, these two world-wise detectives are at a loss, but Delicado and Garzon are not the sort of cops that rely on hunches. They methodically pursue their investigation, drawing the reader into a complex and sordid story in which passions and profits turn men into beasts and animals into victims. Dog Day is set in a Barcelona that few visitors to the city will ever see, a Barcelona that lurks beneath the surface of one of Europe's most dazzling cities. A broken heart, a new monstrosity, and another dead body accompany every step through this demimonde."--BOOK JACKET.

Focuses on women's crime writing from Spain and offers an approach to Spanish crime fiction, combining literary criticism with sociological and criminological theory. This multidisciplinary study analyses how female authors use crime and detective genres to analyse the role and position of their countrywomen.

American comics reflect the distinct sensibilities and experiences of the Jewish American men who played an outsized role in creating them, but what about the contributions of Jewish women? Focusing on the visionary work of seven contemporary female Jewish cartoonists, Tahneer Oksman draws a remarkable connection between innovations in modes of graphic storytelling and the unstable, contradictory, and ambiguous figurations of the Jewish self in the postmodern era. Oksman isolates the dynamic Jewishness that connects each frame in the autobiographical comics of Aline Kominsky Crumb, Vanessa Davis, Miss Lasko-Gross, Lauren Weinstein, Sarah Glidden, Miriam Libicki, and Liana Finck. Rooted in a conception of identity based as much on rebellion as identification and belonging, these artists' representations of Jewishness take shape in the spaces between how we see ourselves and how others see us. They experiment with different representations and affiliations without forgetting that identity ties the self to others. Stemming from Kominsky Crumb's iconic 1989 comic "Nose Job," in which her alter ego refuses to assimilate through cosmetic surgery, Oksman's study is an arresting exploration of invention in the face of the pressure to disappear.

Crime fiction written by women in Spain and Latin America since the late 1980s has been successful in shifting attention to crimes often overlooked by their male counterparts, such as rape and sexual battery, domestic violence, child pornography, pederasty, and incest. In the twenty-first century, social, economic, and political issues, including institutional corruption, class inequality, criminalized oppression of immigrant women, crass capitalist market forces, and mediatized political and religious bodies, have at their core a gendered dimension. The conventions of the original noir, or novela negra, genre have evolved, such that some women authors challenge the noir formulas by foregrounding gender concerns while others imagine new models of crime fiction that depart drastically from the old paradigms. This volume, highlighting such evolution in the crime fiction genre, will be of interest to students, teachers, and scholars of crime fiction in Latin America and Spain, to those interested in crime fiction by women, and to readers familiar with the sub-genres of crime fiction, which include noir, the thriller, the police procedural, and the “cozy” novel.

The Planeta Prize–winning novel from the author of the Petra Delicado series: “A highly literate noir, a powerful tale of lives spiraling out of control” (NB magazine). Irene’s husband has left her for a younger woman and her family business is on the verge of collapse, but the last thing she wants is to be the subject of gossip or pity. So she starts spending time with a divorcée who, in liberating herself from the bonds of marriage, has also freed herself from the clutches of the old crowd of “couple friends.” Javier is a literature teacher who suddenly loses his job at a Catholic school. He’s not ambitious—the months go by and no work materializes. Then, almost by accident, he gets back in contact with a cocky friend from his youth who introduces him to the world of stripping and male prostitution. Circumstance brings Irene and Javier together: he gets some extra cash and mental stimulation out of their relationship, and she finds an outlet for her frustrations. However, Irene doesn’t want to have sex with him—she just wants to see him naked, humiliated, dominated. Their relationship takes a troubling turn, but things may be even more complicated than they seem. Alicia Giménez-Bartlett weaves a tale of economic and personal devastation, portraying the ways that life’s disappointments can bring people to do things they never would have imagined. “Incendiary . . . This provocative dive into gender, power, and class uses diverse viewpoints to craft a powerful story and an unpredictable, memorable ending.” —Publishers Weekly “A stark realist portrait of characters who are searching for their place in a world without redemption.” —Culturamas