Liza Cody is an innovative producer of feminist detective fiction and novels of suspense. While the majority of feminist revisions of the hard-boiled genre locate their private investigators on American mean streets and endow their wisecracking women with guns and violent tendencies, Cody's British serial detective moves more tentatively through the murk of London. Like her American contemporaries, however, Cody uses the detective genre to question and destabilize gender boundaries; her feminist approach to problems of knowledge and authority threaten the institutional and intellectual certainties that crime fiction could once be counted on to reproduce. Cody's detective mysteries are notable for their refusal to provide the reader with neat solutions and closures: investigation may lead to understanding, but it rarely leads to the administration of justice or punishment. A second series of novels, beginning with Bucket Nut (1992), marks a further development in Cody's work away from either detective...