When two members of a folk-dance group are murdered, Dame Beatrice does some detective work.

Many bibliographers focus on women who write. Lawyer Barnett looks at women who detect, at women as sleuths and at the evolving roles of women in professions and in society. Excellent for all women's studies programs as well as for the mystery hound.

Edgar- and Agatha-nominated author Colleen Barnett here updates her essential reference for readers and writers of mystery, examining women who detect, women as sleuths, and the evolving roles of women in professions and in society.

While the roots of the detective novel go back to the 19th century, the genre reached its height around 1925 to 1945. This work presents information on 21 British and American women who wrote during the 20th century. As a group they were largely responsible for the great popularity of the detective novel in the first half of the century. The British authors are Dora Turnbull (Patricia Wentworth), Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Elizabeth Mackintosh (Josephine Tey), Ngaio Marsh, Gladys Mitchell, Margery Allingham, Edith Pargeter (Ellis Peters), Phyllis Dorothy James White (P.D. James), Gwendoline Butler (Jennie Melville), and Ruth Rendell, and the Americans are Patricia Highsmith, Carolyn G. Heilbrun (Amanda Cross), Edna Buchanan, Kate Gallison, Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Nevada Barr, Patricia Cornwell, Carol Higgins Clark, and Megan Mallory Rust. A flavor of each author's work is provided.

Isela Vogel has the power to attract the favor of the gods for anyone who can pay her fee but struggles to hide the degenerative hip condition that will end her career. Then she’s offered a job that will set her and her family up for life. Though her prospective patron is a formidable necromancer with a heated and infuriating gaze, she can hardly refuse the payday. The Allegiance of Necromancers is powerful but not omnipotent, and when someone starts murdering his kind, Azrael must enlist a human godsdancer in order to track down the killer. But why does she have to be so frustratingly stubborn—and intriguing? Azrael can make the dead walk, but he can’t make the very much alive Isela toe any line. Isela is thrown into a world of supernatural creatures—demons after dark, witches in the shadows, shifters running wild in city parks—where the grace of gods can truly infuse the blood of the most mortal-seeming dancer. As the danger increases with each thrilling discovery, trusting Azrael may be the only way to survive a conspiracy to destroy the fragile peace of a broken world. But the greatest threat is their growing attraction. Dancers and necromancers don’t mix for a reason—and death is the least of their worries. Journey to the magical streets of Prague in an alternate present-day thriller for lovers of romantic urban fantasy.

In 1925, Dassas Cormier makes good on a promise and escorts his nephew Frank to New Orleans, but their vacation quickly turns into a search for a killer when Dassas learns a friend, an exotic dancer, has been murdered. As he digs deeper into the dark side of the city, Dassas discovers secrets that involve politicians, bootleggers, federal agents, and underworld thugs—and confronts the shadows that haunt his own heart.

As the 1970s gave way to the 80s, New York's party scene entered a ferociously inventive period characterized by its creativity, intensity, and hybridity. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor chronicles this tumultuous time, charting the sonic and social eruptions that took place in the city’s subterranean party venues as well as the way they cultivated breakthrough movements in art, performance, video, and film. Interviewing DJs, party hosts, producers, musicians, artists, and dancers, Tim Lawrence illustrates how the relatively discrete post-disco, post-punk, and hip hop scenes became marked by their level of plurality, interaction, and convergence. He also explains how the shifting urban landscape of New York supported the cultural renaissance before gentrification, Reaganomics, corporate intrusion, and the spread of AIDS brought this gritty and protean time and place in American culture to a troubled denouement.

Guide with more than two thousand bibliographic entries and cross-references. It includes journal articles, book chapters, essays, and doctoral dissertations, as well as complete books.