Sample of literary figures
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Kathy Mallory
Female
Kathleen ‘Kathy’ Mallory is a tall, green-eyed, beautiful blonde. She is also – according to her creator Carol O’Connell – a sociopath who can be both callous and ruthless. At the age of six, after witnessing the murder of her mother Kathy Mallory, she lived on the streets until she was adopted by a police officer. Encouraged by him, she becomes a police detective. She doesn’t lack admirers, but lives on her own.
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Temperance Brennan
Female
Middle-aged but well-preserved and internationally renowned forensic anthropologist, who (in Kathy Reichs’ novels) works in Canada and the USA, as well as other countries. In the first book, Temperance ‘Tempe’ Brennan is newly divorced and a sober alcoholic. Important people in her life are her daughter Kate, who goes to college, police detective Andrew Ryan, with whom she has an on-and-off relationship, and her sister Harriet.
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Anastasia Kamenskaya
Female
The young, later middle-aged, Anastasia Kamenskaya is an analyst and investigator for the Moscow Police Department. She is linguistically gifted and beautiful, but is careless about her appearance and how she dresses. Her kind live-in partner (later her husband) looks after their home and accepts that she is often too tired for sex. She is also the main character in a long suite of novels by Alexandra Marinina (pseudonym for Marina Anatolyevna Alekseyeva).
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Vera Stanhope
Female
An eccentric, middle-aged, controversial detective chief inspector in Northumberland and in a series of police novels by Ann Cleeves. Stanhope is a grim lone wolf and workaholic, in part because as a child she was subjected to sexual abuse by an acquaintance of her single father. She still lives in her childhood home, drives her father’s old Landrover and solves murder cases in her own very special way.