This challenge is Barbara Fister’s idea to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Sisters in Crime, an international organization founded in 1986 to promote the professional development and advancement of women writing crime fiction.
Easy challenge: write a blog post about a work of crime fiction by a woman author; list five more women authors who you recommend.
Moderate challenge: write five blog posts about works of crime fiction by women authors. For each, mention another woman authorwho writes in a similar vein.
Expert challenge: write ten blog posts about works of crime fiction by women authors. For each, mention three similar women authorswhose works you would recommend.
Deadline: whenever. Another one of the joys of reading for pleasure is not having deadlines. Also, feel free to recycle previous reviews. I’m all about recycling.
Without further ado I will try, wherever possible, to combine my participation on Crime Fiction on a Euro Pass with this challenge. Consequently, after my previous posts about France and Dominique Manotti, I just need to list five other French female crime fiction writers. Here they are: Fred Vargas, Cara Black, Brigitte Aubert, Chantal Pelletier, and Alice Ferney.
Now, to be quite honest I must admit I have only read Fred Vargas and Dominique Manotti. And I really like them both, in their quite different styles. I have Cara Black on my waiting list and I have recently discovered Brigitte Aubert, Chantal Pelletier, and Alice Ferney. Any other suggestions?
Understand from Philip’s comment Alice Ferney, published by Bitter Lemon Press in translation, is not a crime fictiion writer. I’m sorry for that.
Another suggestion will be Andrea H. Japp.
Another blunder, Cara Black (Chicago, Illinois) is American, although her novels are set in Paris.
A Crime is Afoot 
Jose Ignacio, I think you may find that Alice Ferney (Cecile Brossollot) hasn’t written any crime fiction. It’s easy to be misled on this point, because her Angelina’s Children, a work of literary fiction which won numerous prizes as such, is published in translation by Bitter Lemon Press, which we all think of as a publisher of crime fiction. But Francois von Hurter, one of the three owners, said in an interview last year that BLP has lately been turning to the publication of literary and general fiction, and as an example of a novel “outside the genre” of crime fiction, he cites “…Alice Ferney’s classic about the gypsy world, Angelina’s Children.” Ferney’s oeuvre is repeatedly described as concerned with love, femininity, gender differences, and motherhood. Perhaps because their literary/general list remains very short to this point, BLP makes confusion more likely than not, for they don’t distinguish among literary modes on their website.
Thanks for the information Philip. You are right I took for granted she writes crime fiction since she is published in translation by BLP.