Smith, Joan

(British, 1953– )

Joan Smith began her writing career as a journalist working in Manchester and Blackpool. As part of that work she covered the Yorkshire Ripper case which she writes about in her non-fiction book Misogynies (1989). In Smith's crime fiction her detective, Loretta Lawson, nervy yet persistent, is a London University teacher of literature. However, the settings of the books range between Oxford, Paris, and the New York of Full Stop (1995). The book to begin with is the first in the Lawson series, A Masculine Ending (1987), in which Lawson stumbles on a murder victim in a Paris flat. Lawson, her ex-husband, journalist John Tracey, and her amiable sidekick, Bridget, investigate and uncover sexual indiscretion in the academy. In Full Stop Lawson, staying in a friend's flat, receives mysterious phone calls which become salacious and ultimately threatening.

Val McDermid, Amanda Cross, Sarah Dunant    IP