While the titles range from historical fiction to domestic noir and police procedurals, each centres on the death of at least one female character.<\/p>\n
Only The Correspondent, a novel about the art of letter writing, breaks the pattern.<\/p>\n
The trend was highlighted on Instagram by the author Wendy Jones, who wrote: \u201cSo 84% [sic] of the books people bought and read in the UK this week involved a woman being murdered for entertainment. What is going on here?\u201d<\/p>\n
The concentration of currently popular novels about femicide may be striking but is not a new literary phenomenon. From the gothic suspense of Daphne du Maurier to the psychological thrillers of Gillian Flynn, the murdered woman has long been one of fiction\u2019s most enduring plot devices.<\/p>\n
Flynn\u2019s Gone Girl<\/a>, published in 2012, helped propel novels centred on murdered or endangered women into one of the most commercially successful genres, with publishers spending much of the following decade searching for the next \u201cgirl\u201d thriller.<\/p>\n But why does commercial fiction keep returning to the same story? Critics argue that repeatedly turning women into victims risks normalising violence against them. Yet the genre\u2019s paradox is that women are also its biggest consumers, with some arguing its appeal may be a way of processing real-world fears.<\/p>\n The crime writer Mel McGrath wrote<\/a> that the genre has, in some ways, moved on from the time of male authors such as Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane killing off women chiefly so the men investigating their deaths could be heroes. \u201cReading crime fiction written by women remains a powerfully feminist act,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The crime writer and critic Laura Wilson<\/a> explained that domestic noir is popular at the moment because it reflects \u201csome very real fears\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cFemale murder victims are far more likely to have been killed by people they know, such as intimate partners or family members, than male murder victims, who are significantly more likely to die at the hands of strangers,\u201d Wilson said. \u201cEvery industry survey that\u2019s been done on this subject indicates that women account for the majority of crime fiction sales.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Bookmarks<\/p>\n Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n The novelist Denise Mina traced the appetite back to the broadsheet sellers of 18th-century London, who found that manufactured crimes sold copies so long as the victim fitted a particular profile. \u201cThe trope of a dead woman, especially a pretty young white virtuous woman, has sold stories for centuries,\u201d she said. \u201cThe fake stories almost always featured that kind of victim.\u201d<\/p>\n But Mina resisted reading the appetite as sinister. \u201cIt\u2019s what people want to read about, but perhaps it\u2019s not because they want to harm such characters, as much as they want to save them. The narrative propulsion only works if the reader cares deeply about what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n The American criminologist Scott Bonn, author of Why We Love Serial Killers, has made a similar argument about true crime<\/a>. Bonn said many women told him they consumed true crime podcasts and documentaries for \u201ctips on how to protect themselves from attacks by strangers\u201d as well as \u201chow to detect sociopathic red flags\u201d in potentially dangerous men.<\/p>\n For the crime author Lori Rader-Day, the genre\u2019s function is closer to therapy than titillation. \u201cCrime novels are the social novels of our time,\u201d she said. \u201cEven though violent crime is probably at its lowest point in recorded history, crime novels give our anxiety about the state of the world somewhere to go, safely.\u201d<\/p>\n A traditional crime novel, Rader-Day said, wraps up in under 400 pages with the mystery solved and order restored, \u201cnot at all like what actual death is like\u201d, which is precisely why it\u2019s so comforting. She said both craft and culture explained why the victim is so often a woman.<\/p>\n \u201cMost readers, most consumers, are women too, so if a writer wants to showcase anyone\u2019s anxieties, a woman\u2019s is a good choice \u2013 the anxiety that they themselves could become a victim,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n But she was blunter about what the victim often tends to look like. \u201cA pretty woman. Thin. Blonde or redhead. Madonna or sex worker. The pretty dead girl is a stand-in for the innocent victim, without the trouble of having to make the victim a person. It\u2019s a sort of shorthand that works in no small part because of all the garbage we still have lingering in our belief system, like racism, misogyny.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1784057290_42_500.jpg\")
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