Review:CRIME
Valerie Law

… Crime fiction’s always been a place where women writers can slug it out with guys on equal terms, and in CWA’s M.O. they’ve written ten of the nineteen stories. A slender blade of a book, this mostly Brit anthology gives little wriggle room, but the dames manage it nicely covering virtually all the crime subgenres. Carol Ann Davis’ Ripper riff ‘Closure’ gives some gruesome details of victims’ autopsies, but with a new identity for Jack, and a whole new twist besides. Ann Cleeves’ 50s fable ‘Going Back’ has more twists than a heedful of curlers, a mother whose resentment ‘had imposed its own microclimate,’ so that Susan ‘crept around the edge of their lives, frozen and silent.’ And the Caribbean climate of Karline Smith’s ‘Dirty, Evil Greed’ packs more heat than a hoodlum's armpit holster…