Vera Caspary_3 Titles (Noir; Fict) EPUB+MOBI

Long before Desperate Housewives, there was Bedelia: pretty, ultra femme, and “adoring as a kitten.” A perfect housekeeper and lover, she wants nothing more than to please her insecure new husband, who can’t believe his luck. But is Bedelia too good to be true? A mysterious new neighbor turns out to be a detective on the trail of a “kitten with claws of steel”—a picture-perfect wife with a string of dead husbands in her wake.

Caspary builds this tale to a peak of psychological suspense as her characters are trapped together by a blizzard. The true Bedelia, the woman who chose murder over a life on the street, reveals how she turns male fantasies of superiority into a deadly con.

Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era. Enjoy the series: Bedelia; The Blackbirder; Bunny Lake Is Missing; By Cecile; The G-String Murders; The Girls in 3-B; In a Lonely Place; Laura; Mother Finds a Body; Now, Voyager; Skyscraper; Stranger on Lesbos; Women's Barracks.



Laura (1942, 1943) is a detective novel by Vera Caspary. It is her best known work, and was adapted into a popular film in 1944, with Gene Tierney in the title role.

Plot introduction

Like Wilkie Collins' detective novel The Moonstone (1868), Laura is narrated in the first person by several alternating characters. These individual stories all revolve around the apparent murder of the title character, a successful New York advertiser killed in the doorway of her apartment with a shotgun blast that obliterated her face.

Detective Mark McPherson, assigned to the case, begins investigating the two men who were closest to Laura: her former lover, a narcissistic middle-aged writer named Waldo Lydecker, and her fiance, the philandering Shelby Carpenter. As he learns more about Laura, Mark – not the most sentimental of men – begins to fall in love with her memory. When Laura turns out to be very much alive, however, she becomes the prime suspect.

The novel has some autobiographical elements; Caspary, like Laura, was an independent woman who earned her living as an advertiser and who struggled to balance career and romance.



With what Graham Greene once called her "devilish cunning," Vera Caspary offers one of her most suspenseful thrillers in this tale of love, jealousy, guilt, and hate.

When Fletcher marries Elaine, his second wife nineteen years his junior, he can't imagine a more passionate union. Then an illness destroys his confidence, and all he can picture is her next affair. He keeps a secret diary of his fantasized suspicions, making his impending suicide look like murder. . . .

Vera Caspary (1899–1987) is the author of many books including Laura and Bedelia.