"A genuinely original, terrifically interesting book."--Dana Nelson, author of "National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men"

Preface
Acknowledgments
The Advent of Detective Fiction and the Postbellum Period
1. "To Trace a Lie, to Discover a Disguisse" : Genres of Crime and Secrecy
2. "The Eye of Suspicion": The Erotics of Detection in The Dead Letter
3. The Loop of Surveillance in The Figure Eight and Hagar's Daughter
Anna Katharine Green and the Gilded Age
4. " A Woman with a Secret": Knowing and Telling in The Leavenworth Case
5. " A Woman's Hand": Good Works and the Woman Detective
Mary Roberts Rinehart and the Modern Era
6. "No Place for a Spinster" : The Architecture of Retrospection in The Circular Staircase
7. " I suppose They Stood It as Long as They Could": Mothers, Daughters, and Axe Murder in The Album
Afterword
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index