Description: Post-Civil War detective fiction, written mostly by women, considered in relation to other forms of sentimental and domestic fiction.
Review Quotes: "The Web of Iniquity presents strikingly original research on an intriguing subject: the origins of the American detective novel in mid-nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Nickerson has hit upon a rich and absorbing subject. No other book has treated this area of women's literary history in America."--Gillian Brown, author of Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America