In Fatal Females, investigative psychologist and former police profiler Micki Pistorius examines the minds and motives of women who kill. Throughout history the view seems to have prevailed that it is not in women's nature to commit violent crime, but Pistorius shows that this is not in fact the case. Women, givers of life, are indeed capable of ruthlessly taking life. She examines more than fifty documented cases of South African female killers, categorised according to the nature of the crime - for example, infanticide, spree killings, stalkers, poisoners - and she presents her new hypothesis to explain the psychology of that rare individual, the female serial killer.

Tony Rawlins does not think he is a stupidly gullible man. Forlorn and desperate to extricate himself from the aftereffects of a bad marriage, he attempts to find romance by answering a provocative personal ad. Unfortunately, Rawlins is about to find himself victimized by the woman he had hoped would cure his loneliness. Now she has accused him of killing her husband. Innocent but convicted on her convincing testimony, Rawlins heads to jail. Soon, and much to his relief, new evidence is uncovered that casts his accusers story in doubt. She vanishes, and the conviction is set aside until she can be found. Vindicated at least for the time being, Rawlins returns to work where he unwittingly uncovers an illegal business that soon reveals the real reason for the murder. But now others are turning up deadincluding the woman who accused him of murder. In a mystery trilogy of novellas filled with surprising twists and turns, Rawlins must decide who he can trustand who he cannotas he attempts to untangle himself from a dangerous and very determined web of fatal females.

Incarnations of fatal women, or femmes fatales, recur throughout the works of women writers in the Romantic period. Adriana Craciun demonstrates how portrayals of femmes fatales or fatal women played an important role in the development of Romantic women's poetic identities and informed their exploration of issues surrounding the body, sexuality and politics. Craciun covers a wide range of writers and genres from the 1790s through the 1830s. She discusses the work of well-known figures including Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as lesser-known writers like Anne Bannerman. By examining women writers' fatal women in historical, political and medical contexts, Craciun uncovers a far-ranging debate on sexual difference. She also engages with current research on the history of the body and sexuality, providing an important historical precedent for modern feminist theory's ongoing dilemma regarding the status of 'woman' as a sex.

Gender, Supernatural Beings, and the Liminality of Death: Monstrous Males/Fatal Females examines representations of the supernatural dead to demonstrate shifts in the manifestation of gender. Including readings of East Asian detectives/cyborgs, Iranian vampires, and African zombies, among others, This collection offers a multi-faceted look at myth, legend, and popular culture representations of the gendered supernatural from a broad range of international contexts. The contributors show that, as creatures pass through the liminal space of death, their new supernatural forms challenge cultural conceptions of gender, masculinity, and femininity.

Women are supposed to be tender and loving – not cold-hearted killers, knife-wielding vampires or gun-toting hijackers. Yet throughout history, there’s been no shortage of less than law-abiding ladies. Let journalist Libby-Jane Charleston take you on a chilling journey through a true crime gallery of women who have smashed our perceptions of the stereotypical feminine persona: from meek Russian librarian Lucy Dudko, who commandeered a helicopter to break her boyfriend out of prison; to suburban sex goddess Michelle Burgess, who hired a hit man to take out her lover’s wife; and Katherine Knight, who killed, skinned and cooked her partner to serve to his children. Read these true stories and delve into the dark and disturbing lives of Australia’s most fatal females. Former TV reporter Libby-Jane Charleston began her career in her teens as one of Australia’s youngest newspaper columnists. She has worked extensively in radio, papers and magazines as well as on TV – appearing on-camera for every television network in Australia, as a finance news anchor, current affairs reporter and general news reporter at Channels Ten, Nine, Seven, SBS & ABC.

Esther Garber is the character/novelist who inhabited Tanith Lee as she wrote Fatal Women, a collection of short novels and stories of lesbian love, both sexual and emotional. The stories' heroes and villains are women. Men, however pleasant - or atrocious - are peripheral to Garber's world. Mothers, grandmothers, peculiar aunts - and female lovers, always live out their lives centre stage. Erotic and sophisticatedly explicit, the motivation behind the histories draws from the psychology of women. But is driven by the reasonless logic of the obsessive heart. About Fatal Women In the Paris of 1900, Phhdre is an assassin. She assists female acquaintances suffering from specific male abuse - by 'removing' the abuser. Phhdre is sexually predatory but emotionally cool. Until she meets Rherlotte de Gillan in the Cemetery of St. Luc. Rherlotte's red-haired beauty and enigmatic, dignified sweetness soak relentlessly through Phhdre's shell, like honey. And soon the two women are joined in a dangerous game that is both courtship and duel. Elsewhere, in the late 1800s, the provincial town of Bois-la-Diane begins to be haunted by the dark, phantasmal creature - Virgile, the professional widow. Laure, bored with rural life, her childhood girlfriend and the disappointing 'ladies club' that holds its scandalous sessions in an old chateau, is instantly hypnotised by Virgile. But Virgile's fee is always death, and not only Laure's, but that of another. Each of the eponymous heroines who people Fatal Women has her own secret - one poisonous and potentially lethal, one bittersweet, and one that concerns perhaps the most priceless painting on earth.

"examines the changing social and economic status of women from the 1860s through the 1880s, and rejects the stereotypical mid-Victorian femme fatale portrayed by conservative ideologues critiquing popular fiction by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Honore de Balzac, and William Makepeace Thackeray. In these book reviews, the female protagonist is simply minimized to a dangerous woman. Refuting this one-dimensional characterization, this book argues that the femme fatale comes to represent the real-life struggles of the middle-class Victorian woman who overcomes major adversities such as poverty, abusive husbands, abandonment, single parenthood, limited job opportunities, the criminal underworld, and Victorian society's harsh invective against her." --publisher description.