Meet some fascinating females:

• Jennie Baxer, 1890s journalist and world traveller
• Nelvana of the Northern Lights, created for comic book-starved Canadians during the Second World War
• the 60s Eve Adam, the "Rock Hit of Prague," whose methods violate all the "rules" for detective books
• and, very much of the 1990s, vampire detective Vicki Nelson, whose beat is Toronto s Queen Street West

As well as the fifteen investigating women in the book, Skene-Melvin s introduction describes hundreds of female sleuths and their creators in an...