SOURCE: “Female Virtues,” in Times Literary Supplement, October 21, 1994, p. 20.

In the following review, Craig discusses the “female virtues” of the protagonists in Sue Grafton's K Is for Killer and Paretsky's Tunnel Vision.

There is a moment in the latest Sue Grafton novel, K is for Killer, when the heroine Kinsey Millhone leafs through some back numbers of the magazine Family Circle and finds herself bemused: “To me, it was like reading about life on an alien planet.” What is confronting her, causing distaste and a rueful incomprehension, is a flawless domestic world of beauty aids, floor-cleaners, children and home cooking. Kinsey herself—along with Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski—embodies a kind of female virtue which is at the opposite extreme from the housewifely figment contained in the woman's magazine. She and V. I. (Vic) Warshawski are not themselves any less the products of fantasy—but the fantasy...