Sarah Weinman is widely recognized as a leading authority on crime fiction. She is the editor of Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense (Penguin, 2013), which the Los Angeles Review of Books called "simply one of the most significant anthologies of crime fiction, ever." She is the news editor for Publishers Marketplace and her work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the National Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, among other publications. Her long-running (but now on hiatus) blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, was hailed by USA TODAY as "a respected resource for commentary on crime fiction." Weinman lives in Brooklyn, New York.

A landmark collection of four brilliant novels by the female pioneers of crime fiction-women who paved the way for Gillian Flynn, Tana French, and Lisa Scottoline

Though women crime and suspense writers dominate today's bestseller lists, the extraordinary work of their mid-century predecessors is largely unknown. Turning from the mean streets of the hardboiled school, these groundbreaking female novelists found the roots of fear and violence in a quiet suburban neighborhood, on a college campus, or in a comfortable midtown hotel. Their work-influential in its day and still vibrant today-is long overdue for discovery.

Edited by The Real Lolita author Sarah Weinman, this collection gathers four classic crime novels from the 1940s: Vera Caspary's famous career girl mystery, Laura; Helen Eustis's intricate academic thriller, The Horizontal Man; Dorothy B. Hughes's terrifyingly intimate portrait of a serial killer, In a Lonely Place; and Elizabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall, in which a wartime wife is forced to take extreme measures when her family is threatened. Together, these underappreciated works reveal the vital and unacknowledged lineage of today's leading crime writers.
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