Sample of literary figures
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Fran Hunter
Female
Single mother, artist and teacher who settles on the Shetland Islands so that her daughter Cassie can get to know her father, Fran’s former husband, who is from the islands. However, Fran finds herself in a murder mystery and meets police officer Jimmy Perez with whom she starts a relationship. The books about Hunter and Perez gave author Ann Cleeves her breakthrough – despite the tragic end to the love story.
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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.
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Thursday Next
Female
She is called Thursday Next, and is an agent for a state organisation in an absurd, parallel world (i.e. parallel to our own) that is imbued with literary features. She is newly married – we get to know that her husband Landen Parke-Laine drowned when he was three years old – and has a son Friday. Her mother is called Wednesday. Jasper Fforde has written a suite of very different fantasy crime novels about Thursday Next and her world.
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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.