SALON

Monday, Jun 12, 2000 5:44 PM UTC

Spy girls

The author of "The Best Thing I Ever Tasted" picks five novels about kick-ass secret-agent women.

By

Topics: Readers and Reading, Books,

Spy girls

I‘m the kind of reader who doesn’t like to waste time with fluffy books. I like books that teach me something — preferably something useful and unexpected. For instance, I like to find out how to bypass electronic hotel-security systems, make a bomb out of common kitchen supplies or create a new identity complete with credit history. If this kind of lesson comes sandwiched in between scenes of cruelty, sex and secret-agent-style international high jinks, all the better. And I learn best from women. Following are five of my favorite novels about kick-ass, super-competent, coolheaded, hotblooded, semilegal girls.

Modesty Blaise by Peter O’Donnell
I collect Modesty. She is the queen of kick-ass girls, born in a comic strip and finally killed last year after appearing in three decades’ worth of stories. The Blaise series is one of the most reliably predictable suspense series I’ve ever found: the same harrowing biography of a nomadic orphan of uncertain heritage who becomes a teenage crime-syndicate leader, the same inevitable plunge into danger with her best friend Willie Garvin, the same fight against terrible odds to rid the world of a nasty person — invariably a psychotic genius planning a terrible crime against innocents. She kills more, fights more, survives more and has sex more often than James Bond. Dig her.

Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry
Jane Whitefield is a specialist in disappearances. She is lovely, smart and mysterious, part Seneca Indian, a loner of preternatural calm during danger and with a deep bag of tricks. Jane doesn’t have an office. Friends refer friends; through the grapevine come endangered children, battered women, criminals who’ve changed their minds. They come to Jane and she disappears them — new name, papers, habits, home. Since her clients get to her doorstep about 10 minutes ahead of the bad guys, this all happens on the run. In this first of a series, Jane has a satisfyingly difficult time working out the kinks with a client who seems to need her in more ways than one and turns out to be both less and more than she thought.

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King
The first and by far the best of a series of Holmesian pastiches. Mary Russell is an orphaned, acerbic, teenage girl genius who literally runs into the retired Sherlock Holmes and neatly inserts herself into his careful and lonesome world. Lots of bombs, disguises, safe rooms, chemistry, spying and lock picking and the usual cast of suspects.

The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith
Like their male counterparts, the best female secret-agent types have dark corners in their lonely psyches. Griffith, who also writes excellent science fiction, here creates Aud Torvingen, an affluent, violent, Norwegian ex-cop, cold and hot all over. She knows how to fight, kill, survive and think but learns how to love only when she meets Julia on the trail of an art thief and murderer. Wheels within wheels, great sex, tragedy and even a little woodworking.

Void Moon by Michael Connelly
Cassie Black is a reformed casino cat burglar, just out of prison and trying to go straight while she mourns her dead lover and crime partner and hides a terrible secret. Of course, she is forced back into crime for the most selfless of reasons, and the reader learns why you’re never safe in hotel rooms, you should never waste money at casino tables, how to use night-vision goggles and why criminals should never trust cellphones. Scary and fun.

Sallie Tisdale's most recent book is "Women of the Way: Discovering 2500 Years of Buddhist Wisdom" (Harper San Francisco, 2006). She contributes to magazines such as Harper's, Tricycle, and Antioch Review. More Sallie Tisdale.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations