Sample of literary figures
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Maria Wern
Female
Maria Wern is a young sergeant who balances crime investigations with family life, including an insufferable husband. She later moves to the island of Gotland where she continues to solve crime. The author, Anna Jansson, has also written a number of young adult detective novels that feature Wern’s son, Emil.
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Paddy Meehan
Female
When Patricia ‘Paddy’ Meehan gets a job with a newspaper in Glasgow, she is overjoyed. The job isn’t as much fun as she had hoped, but after having solved a murder case she is promoted to crime reporter – and can solve some more cases. Her family are poor, but she nevertheless manages to live a fairly pleasant private life, writes Denise Mina in her dark detective stories about Paddy.
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Tony Hill
Male
Anthony ‘Tony’ Hill is a qualified psychologist as well as a skilful ‘profiler’ often used by the police in Bradford in a suite of crime novels by Val McDermid. He works with Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan, and they have a complicated private relationship. Hill is sickly, sexually dysfunctional and there are details that mention an unhappy and mentally stressful childhood and youth.
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Camille Verhœven
Male
Author Pierre Lemaitre doesn’t make life easy for his middle-aged detective chief inspector, Camille Verhœven, in Paris. His pregnant wife is tortured to death in the first book: in the fourth book, his girlfriend Anne Forestier is almost killed in connection with a robbery. The short and entirely bald police officer, who isn’t always particularly sympathetic, solves the cases; then he resigns.