Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s popular crime series, written in Spanish and organized around the exploits of Police Inspector Petra Delicado and Deputy Inspector Fermin Garzon, is arguably the most successful detective series published in Spain during the previous three decades. Nina L. Molinaro examines the tensions between the rhetoric of gender differences espoused by the woman detective and the orthodox ideology of the police procedural. She argues that even as the series incorporates gender differences into the crime series formula, it does so in order to correct women, naturalize men’s authority, sanction social hierarchies, and assuage collective anxieties. As Molinaro shows, with the exception of the protagonist, the women characters require constant surveillance and modification, often as a result of men’s supposedly intrinsic protectiveness or excessive sexuality. Men, by contrast, circulate more freely in the fictional world and are intrinsic to the political, psychological, and economic prosperity of their communities. Molinaro situates her discussion in Petra Delicado’s contemporary Spain of dog owners, ¡Hola!, Russian cults, and gated communities.

Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s popular crime series, written in Spanish and organized around the exploits of Police Inspector Petra Delicado and Deputy Inspector Fermin Garzon, is arguably the most successful detective series published in Spain during the previous three decades. Nina L. Molinaro examines the tensions between the rhetoric of gender differences espoused by the woman detective and the orthodox ideology of the police procedural. She argues that even as the series incorporates gender differences into the crime series formula, it does so in order to correct women, naturalize men’s authority, sanction social hierarchies, and assuage collective anxieties. As Molinaro shows, with the exception of the protagonist, the women characters require constant surveillance and modification, often as a result of men’s supposedly intrinsic protectiveness or excessive sexuality. Men, by contrast, circulate more freely in the fictional world and are intrinsic to the political, psychological, and economic prosperity of their communities. Molinaro situates her discussion in Petra Delicado’s contemporary Spain of dog owners, ¡Hola!, Russian cults, and gated communities.

Petra Delicado, a Barcelona police inspector assigned to a desk job, returns to the homicide department to investigate the rapes of young girls by a serial rapist who only leaves a circular mark on his victims' forearms.

Alicia Giménez Bartlett's popular crime series, organized around the exploits of Police Inspector Petra Delicado and Deputy Inspector Fermín Garzón, is arguably the most successful detective series in Spain of the last three decades. Nina L. Molinaro examines the tensions between the rhetoric of gender differences espoused by the woman detective and the orthodox ideology of the police procedural, and she situates her discussion in Petra Delicado's contemporary Spain of dog owners, ¡Hola!, Russian cults, and gated communities.

Crime fiction written by women in Spain and Latin America since the late 1980s has been successful in shifting attention to crimes often overlooked by their male counterparts, such as rape and sexual battery, domestic violence, child pornography, pederasty, and incest. In the twenty-first century, social, economic, and political issues, including institutional corruption, class inequality, criminalized oppression of immigrant women, crass capitalist market forces, and mediatized political and religious bodies, have at their core a gendered dimension. The conventions of the original noir, or novela negra, genre have evolved, such that some women authors challenge the noir formulas by foregrounding gender concerns while others imagine new models of crime fiction that depart drastically from the old paradigms. This volume, highlighting such evolution in the crime fiction genre, will be of interest to students, teachers, and scholars of crime fiction in Latin America and Spain, to those interested in crime fiction by women, and to readers familiar with the sub-genres of crime fiction, which include noir, the thriller, the police procedural, and the “cozy” novel.

"A mongrel dog named Freaky, the corpse of a man with a seemingly endless list of aliases, and a handful of tips from an anonymous woman caller. With these elements hard-nosed Inspector Petra Delicado and her sentimental sidekick, Fermin Garzon, begin an investigation into big-money dog smuggling. Their best leads come from the most unlikely sources: a ruggedly handsome vet; a blond bombshell who trains guard dogs; an eccentric university professor; and a haughty dog groomer. At times, these two world-wise detectives are at a loss, but Delicado and Garzon are not the sort of cops that rely on hunches. They methodically pursue their investigation, drawing the reader into a complex and sordid story in which passions and profits turn men into beasts and animals into victims. Dog Day is set in a Barcelona that few visitors to the city will ever see, a Barcelona that lurks beneath the surface of one of Europe's most dazzling cities. A broken heart, a new monstrosity, and another dead body accompany every step through this demimonde."--BOOK JACKET.

Focuses on women's crime writing from Spain and offers an approach to Spanish crime fiction, combining literary criticism with sociological and criminological theory. This multidisciplinary study analyses how female authors use crime and detective genres to analyse the role and position of their countrywomen.