Meny

Sample of literary figures

  • 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).

    Further reading

  • Paul Brenner

    Male

    When we worked as an undercover agent for a crime investigation department in the American army, he revealed dangerous facts which led to him being retired early. But the department needed his knowledge and Paul Brenner reluctantly re-entered the service, explains his creator Nelson DeMille. He then became a colleague of Cynthia Sunhill, and their cooperation developed into a romantic relationship.

    Further reading

  • Peter Diamond

    Male

    Peter Diamond is a police officer, formerly stationed in London, and now working in Bath in Somerset. He is 50+, a widower and overweight with abominable dietary habits – ‘an ambulatory heart attack’, according to his creator Peter Lovesey. Already in the early books, Diamond left the police service, but returned after a couple of novels. Through his stubbornness and the way he ignores orders, he solves a number of sensitive cases.

    Further reading

  • Matthew Hope

    Male

    Lawyer Matthew Hope moves with his wife Susan and daughter Joanna from Chicago to Calusa in Florida to work with commercial law for a small law firm. But nothing goes as he wished: thanks to his detective talents, he unwillingly becomes a leading criminal lawyer and his marriage ends in divorce, as we read in the books by Ed McBain (pseudonym for Evan Hunter).

    Further reading