Eight books about small-town woman detectives

Sophie Stein is an intern at Electric Literature. She was born in Chicago and is currently an MFA candidate at Indiana University, where she is the Fiction Editor of the Indiana Review. Her short fiction has won awards from The Hypertext Review and december magazine; her work has also appeared in The Briar Cliff Review, The Tangerine, and elsewhere.

At Electric Lit Stein tagged eight titles about small-town woman detectives, including:

The Likeness by Tana French

Detective Cassie Maddox of the Dublin Murder Squad has had a rough go of it. Her last investigation brought her into conflict with a psychopath, leaving her with stab wounds and forcing her to quit the murder beat. But when a woman who looks eerily identical to Cassie turns up dead, her old boss talks her into a dangerous plan: Cassie will go undercover in the victim’s place to tempt the killer out of hiding. As Cassie gets drawn into the life her double left behind, she loses track of the boundaries between her real and undercover identities.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Likeness is among Alison Wisdom's sven great thrillers featuring communal living, Christopher Louis Romaguera's nine books about mistaken identity, and Simon Lelic's top ten false identities in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue