Now, I don’t really object to the authors included in Janet Maslin’s latest column of Crowd Pleasers. Harlan Coben, Lee Child, Joe Finder, Peter Robinson, John Hart – all excellent authors whose most recent books I very much liked (Dan Brown and Dean Koontz, well, my particular jury’s out, to say the least.) But allow me to drop the so-called objective veil for a moment to say this: why, oh freaking why, is there not a single female author included in said roundup? Is it so hard to pick up a novel by a mystery & thriller writer who, oh, happens to be a woman? To be fair, the season in mystery at the moment seems to be rather dominated by men, but how about when the next installment of this column is out in, say, six or eight weeks or so, the skew is more female-centric? A few suggestions: Laura Lippman, Denise Mina, Laurie King, Cornelia Read. Really, it’s not that difficult, Janet. Bet you can’t stop at just one.
Then again, this is a particular problem of the Book Review, so why shouldn’t it carry over to the Daily pages?