Mystery Women, Volume 3, is the most recent in a series about the changing roles of women in the mystery novel. Volume 3 contains more than 580 series with female sleuths who were introduced during the years 1990-1999. This is an astounding number, barely falling short of the total identified in the first two volumes, which covered one hundred years.

Increasingly, the mystery novel explores major issues of interest to women, considering both the positive and negative impact of changes in status. Volume 3 covers female sleuths from more than a dozen countries, of assorted ages, education and employment, religious beliefs and political ideologies, states of life and historical periods. The authors include both men and women. The focus is on the protagonist, not the writer. The biographies of the women are based on personal reviews of the books in which they appeared.

In order to be included in the survey, a character must have made a substantial appearance in at least two books published between January 1, 1990 and December 31, 2001. Volume 2 in the "Mystery Women" series was nominated for an Agatha Award for non-fiction published in 2002.

Reviews

Colleen Barnett's ambitious series, Mystery Women: An Encyclopedia of Leading Women Characters in Mystery Fiction now spans three volumes: Volume 1 (1860-1979) Revised (Poisoned Pen Press, 383 pages, $16.95), Volume 2 (1980-1989) (397 pages, $16.95), and Volume 3 (1990-1999) (868 pages, $33.95). It's a mammoth undertaking which catalogs well over a thousand mystery series featuring women protagonists by both men and women writers, although most of the writers examined are women. The entries are heavily annotated, providing a wealth of plot and character information on all books in a given series (but none other than pseudonyms on the authors), and are arranged by characters' names and cross-indexed by author, title, and year the first book in the series was published. There is a minimum of critical commentary in the individual entries and no attempt to rank any of the series by importance, literary merit, or historical significance and we're not certain whether this is a strength or weakness, given the literal-mindedness the author exhibits in her introductions to the individual volumes. Even so, this is a valuable reference work that any serious reader of the genre should own. --Denver Post