Women Sleuths (Academy Mystery Novellas, 1) - Tapa blanda

G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, "The Toys of Death;" An engaging little old lady solves a baffling murder on the south coast of England. Mignon Eberhart, "The Calico Dog;" Susan Dare accepts what is certainly "an invitation to murder" when she gets involved iwth conflicting claimants to a large fortune. Marcia Muller, "The Broken Men;" San Francisco investigator Sharon McCone guards two famous participants in a clown festival and gets enmeshed in homicide. Cornell Woolrich, "The Book that Squealed;" A defaced library book leads to kidnapping and murder in a classic puzzler solved by a librarian.

Bill Pronzini is simply one of the masters. He seems to have taken a crack at just about every genre: mysteries, noirish thrillers, historicals, locked-room mysteries, adventure novels, spy capers, men's action, westerns, and, of course, his masterful, long-running Nameless private detective series, now entering its fourth decade, with no signs of creative flagging. He's also ghosted several Brett Halliday short stories as Michael Shayne for Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine, and has managed to collaborate with such fellow writers as John Lutz, Barry Wahlberg, Collin Wilcox and Marcia Muller. Still, if he never ventured into fiction writing, his non-fiction work, as both writer and editor, would still earn him a place in the P.I. genre's Hall of Fame.