The mystery is one of the most venerable of modern fiction genres, tracing its lineage back to Edgar Alan Poe's tales of August Dupin. Contemporary mysteries still get solved by logic and observation, but detectives' other traits and modes of operation have become much more varied in the past two or three decades. There are now more women detectives than anyone can count. Some of their stories display further parallels to elements of After All These Years.

Ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands mean trouble for many female sleuths. Vicious lawyerly traps turn out to be placed by the P.I.'s ex-husband in Tunnel Vision (1994) by Sara Paretsky.

Lieutenant Molina's zeal to nail the vanished Mystifying Max brings constant police suspicion to his former lover Temple Barr, the heroine of Catnap (1992) and later mysteries by Carole Nelson Douglas. But it is left to Rosie Meyers to prove that...