![\"\"](\"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/no-biz-being-a-cop.jpg\")
<\/a>I love the whole series but I think my favorite is No Business\u00a0Being a Cop<\/em> (1979), when Norah is investigating the deaths of four fellow policewomen, and narrowly escapes death herself as a male colleague has decided woman have no place on the force.\u00a0 While 1979 doesn\u2019t seem like that long ago, the sexism O\u2019Donnell writes about feels very different from a contemporary workplace.\u00a0 However, her fellow writers write about female characters still encountering this workplace diminishment, right up through Carrie Smith\u2019s recent Claire Codella series.<\/p>\nWhile O\u2019Donnell\u2019s series flourished until the late 90\u2019s, the 80\u2019s, in terms of American crime fiction, were dominated by female private eyes created by writers like Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and Linda Barnes.\u00a0 These strong women didn\u2019t want or need the confinement of working within a police department.\u00a0 They were gloriously on their own.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Donnell paved the way for this specific sub genre, however, and these books were written in the same time period as the female private eyes were grabbing the attention.<\/p>\n
Of course there\u2019s Michael Connelly, still going strong 21 books into his now classic Harry Bosch series.\u00a0 If you\u2019re a mystery reader, serious or casual, you\u2019ve probably read at least one of these books, but I recommend reading the whole series in order to see how the mind of smart loner Harry Bosch solves crimes.\u00a0 A stand out for me is The Last Coyote<\/em> (1995) which along with The Concrete<\/em> Blonde<\/em> (1994) ties into the story of his mother\u2019s murder.\u00a0 Crisp, haunting, and well told.\u00a0 Connelly has joined the female fray, introducing cop Renee Ballard with The Late Show<\/em> (2017).<\/p>\n Read a little bit more about Lillian O\u2019Donnell here<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At a book club recently, one of the members asked what were my favorite police novels?\u00a0 The obvious answer, Michael Connelly, sprang up, but the writers who drew me in to this particular sub genre were women.\u00a0 One of the true pioneers in this sub genre, Lillian O\u2019Donnell, is one of my favorite writers.\u00a0 My … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[230,228,232,229,231,227,58,234,8,233],"class_list":["post-3328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-barbara-damato","tag-carrrie-smith","tag-karin-slaughter","tag-lee-martin","tag-leslie-glass","tag-lillian-odonnell","tag-margaret-maron","tag-michael-connelly","tag-police","tag-robert-ellis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3328"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3340,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3328\/revisions\/3340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>Margaret Maron’s series about the uptight Sigrid Harald (spanning 1981-2017) contains some of my favorite mysteries of all time.\u00a0 When Maron is at her best she is absolute perfection, and this swath of Sigrid’s life where she finds and loses love never forgets that there’s also a clever story to be told.\u00a0 These echo O’Donnell but Sigrid is a different cat altogether from Norah.\u00a0 If you seek perfection, don’t miss Death of a Butterfly\u00a0<\/em>(1984) or\u00a0Corpus Christmas\u00a0<\/em>(1989).<\/p>\n<\/a>Lee Martin (a pen name for writer Anne Wingate) wrote a wonderful series about female Texas cop Deb Ralston (1984-1990), who is juggling a busy family life alongside being a cop.\u00a0 These brisk, complex, well told stories are addictive.\u00a0 I think my favorite is The<\/em> Mensa Murders<\/em> (1990) where Deb investigates a series of crimes tied somehow to a local mensa group.<\/p>\n<\/a>Another favorite of mine is Leslie Glass, whose April Woo series spans 1993-2005.\u00a0 April, a Chinese cop with a domineering mother (a stand out character through the series), dates an Hispanic cop.\u00a0 She\u2019s often pulled between the traditional Chinese culture her mother wants her to embrace and the Western culture she\u2019s grown up in, as a native New Yorker.\u00a0 These are tight, well paced thrillers, and a favorite for me is Stealing Time<\/em> (1999) which deals with the different levels of cultural involvement and pulling away among April\u2019s own circle and in the killing of a Chinese woman whose husband wants to control the investigation.<\/p>\n<\/a>Then there\u2019s Barbara D\u2019Amato who fits in both categories.\u00a0 She has a series featuring reporter (as D\u2019Amato herself was) Cat Marsala, but she has 5 wonderful police novels spanning from 1996-2004.\u00a0 She has a very specific Chicago location and her love of research shows and illuminates the books.\u00a0 My favorite is Good Cop, Bad Cop<\/em> (1998), which has a neat structure of a good brother and a bad one and how their paths intersect, using a famous Chicago police scandal as a backdrop.\u00a0 All of D\u2019Amato\u2019s well structured, well written and fast moving books are a never-miss as far as I\u2019m concerned.<\/p>\n<\/a>Robert Ellis also writes a wonderful female cop in his Lena Gamble, with a three book series (2007-2011).\u00a0 My favorite is the almost poetic Murder Season<\/em> where Lena is called up in the middle of the night to look into a case of an accused and acquitted killer who has been found dead.\u00a0 The writing in this novel is outstanding as are Ellis\u2019 story telling chops.<\/p>\n<\/a>Karin Slaughter’s violent books are more than redeemed by great writing and incredible characters and storytelling.\u00a0\u00a0 She has two great series\u00a0 – one featuring medical examiner Sara Linton, and cop Will Trent, both fascinatingly damaged characters.\u00a0 But the real stand out for me is Cop Town<\/em> (2014), for which Slaughter was deservedly nominated for an Edgar.\u00a0 In it she highlights the sexism as female cops entered the Atlanta police force in 1974.<\/p>\n<\/a>A recent passion of mine is Carrie Smith, whose three book series about female cop Claire Codella who is returning to work after a bout with cancer, and encounters all kinds of different levels of sexism and envy (she broke a big case before her illness).\u00a0 The three novels each focus on a different issue: Silent City<\/em> (2015) on education; Forgotten City<\/em> (2016) on Alzheimer’s; and Unholy City<\/em> (2017) on religion.\u00a0 Unholy City<\/em> is also a neat locked room mystery.\u00a0 These are terrific, vivid reads.<\/p>\n