A salute to the real femmes fatales of the domestic suspense genre, and the deceitful children, deranged husbands, vengeful friends, and murderous wives they unleashed. Sarah Weinman, one of today's preeminent authorities of crime fiction, brings together fourteen chilling stories by women who -- from the 1940s through the mid-1970s -- took a scalpel to contemporary society and sliced away to revel its dark essence.

"Attorney Rhonda Bird returns home after a long estrangement when she learns her father has died. There she makes two important discoveries: her father stopped being an accountant and had opened up a private detective agency, and she has a teenage half sister named Baby. Baby brings in a client to the detective agency, a young man who claims he was abducted. During the course of the investigation, Rhonda and Baby become entangled in a dangerous case...

Determined to reinvent himself, Serge Storms heads for the Florida Keys, intent on marrying some as yet undiscovered Ms. Right, only to run into every other lowlife and lunatic seeking asylum there.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this modern classic, the acclaimed author of The Shards explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other.
"A seminal book.” —The Washington Post
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in...

Six years after her husband killed himself after being accused of murdering an Indian girl, Diana Ladd relies on a Native American wise woman and a local police detective to protect her and her son from her late husband's partner, recently released from prison.