3.5
Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives
ByPublisher Description
Fourteen chilling tales from the pioneering women who created the domestic suspense genre
Murderous wives, deranged husbands, deceitful children, and vengeful friends. Few know these characters—and their creators—better than Sarah Weinman. One of today’s preeminent authorities on crime fiction, Weinman asks: Where would bestselling authors like Gillian Flynn, Sue Grafton, or Tana French be without the women writers who came before them?
In Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, Weinman brings together fourteen hair-raising tales by women who—from the 1940s through the mid-1970s—took a scalpel to contemporary society and sliced away to reveal its dark essence. Lovers of crime fiction from any era will welcome this deliciously dark tribute to a largely forgotten generation of women writers.
Murderous wives, deranged husbands, deceitful children, and vengeful friends. Few know these characters—and their creators—better than Sarah Weinman. One of today’s preeminent authorities on crime fiction, Weinman asks: Where would bestselling authors like Gillian Flynn, Sue Grafton, or Tana French be without the women writers who came before them?
In Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, Weinman brings together fourteen hair-raising tales by women who—from the 1940s through the mid-1970s—took a scalpel to contemporary society and sliced away to reveal its dark essence. Lovers of crime fiction from any era will welcome this deliciously dark tribute to a largely forgotten generation of women writers.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesTroubled Daughters, Twisted Wives Reviews
3.5
“If I were to build my Mount Rushmore out of this anthology, this superb, gripping, domestic suspense anthology, I'd surely choose Patricia Highsmith, Helen Nielsen, Joyce Harrington, and the 'Godmother' Elizabeth Holding!
Weinman makes no error in handpicking some of the most elite masters of their work, the women authors of the last century who brought domestic crime, suspense, thriller stories into the mainstream.
Ugh, how the 'Kouros' was a tragic juxtaposition for the husband and wife, the damaged wife who became the monster she despised in her husband, how the crime looks so justified when viewed from the eyes of the perpetrator, how the perpetrators don't seem like perpetrators (the 'Sleeper cells'), how peace was found in jail and what led the lady crave a murder for the same, how the heroine was so normally criminal that it didn't alarm even the third person, i.e., the reader till the very last line of the story; the book leaves you in awe, complemented with an equal measure of fear and skepticism about how the person who seems perfectly normal, is, indeed, not.
Such sweet bodies and such heinous minds; the book questions your perception of the 'normal person'.
If you go in without expecting the story to be along a certain line and hold its hand and let it lead you and expose itself to you as it wants, you won't regret picking it up. Contextually, with the stories being written back at that time, the book is as belly-swirling as it gets.”
“my fav stories were louisa, please come home by shirley jackson and the stranger in the car by elisabeth sanxay”
About Sarah Weinman
Sarah Weinman is the news editor for Publishers Marketplace and writes the monthly “Crimewave” mystery and suspense column for the National Post. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New York Observer, Slate, and the New Yorker online, among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Follow @sarahw on Twitter and visit sarahweinman.com.
Other books by Sarah Weinman
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