Death Wears a White Gardenia

Book excerpt: Zelda Popkin solves her intriguing mystery with a female detective named Mary Carner. Death Wears a White Gardenia is the first of a series of mystery novels featuring young, and pretty Mary Carner, a trained investigator on the security staff of a major department store in New York City in the late thirties and early forties. Mary Carner is analytical, intuitive, direct, tactful, independent, and receptive. Her character, emerging when it did, challenged the male gender-role stereotyping that for many years was all there was in detective fiction. By now, however, the female detective has found her place and is much admired in literature, film, and television. Zelda Popkin's Mary Carner was before her time. She emerges here again, a fully-conceived woman, a fully-conceived professional so we can see that today's female detectives, like Jessica Fletcher and V. I. Warshawski, follow in the footsteps that Zelda Popkin's Mary Carner marked so well. Boson Books also offers Time Off for Murder by Zelda Popkin. For an author bio and photo, reviews, and a reading sample, visit bosonbooks.com.