Books about Fatales from Amazon.com

The local Film Noir festival takes a dark turn when a legendary femme fatale is nearly killed. Now, bookstore owner Penelope Thornton-McClure enlists the help of Jack Shepard, P.I.—even though he and his license expired more than fifty years ago..
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In 1917, the notorious Oriental dancer Mata Hari was arrested on the charge of espionage; less than one year later, she was tried and executed, charged with the deaths of at least 50,000 gallant French soldiers The mistress of many senior Allied officers and government officials, even the French minister of war, she had a sharp intellect and a golden tongue fluent in several languages; she also traveled widely throughout war-torn Europe, with seeming disregard for the political and strategic alliances and borders. But was she actually a spy? In this persuasive new biography, Pat Shipman explores the life and times of the mythic and deeply misunderstood dark-eyed siren to find the truth.

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No one better understands the desire to be bad than Elizabeth Wurtzel.

Bitch is a brilliant tract on the history of manipulative female behavior   By looking at women who derive their power from their sexuality, Wurtzel offers a trenchant cultural critique of contemporary gender relations.  Beginning with Delilah, the first woman to supposedly bring a great man down (latter-day Delilahs include Yoko Ono, Pam Smart, Bess Myerson), Wurtzel finds many biblical counterparts to the men and women in today's headlines.

In five brilliant extended essays, she links the lives of women as demanding and disparate as Amy Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Margaux Hemingway, and Nicole Brown Simpson.  Wurtzel gives voice to those women whose lives have been misunderstood, who have been dismissed for their beauty, their madness, their youth.

She finds in the story of Amy Fisher the tragic plight of all Lolitas, our thirst for their brief and intense flame.  She connects Hemingway's tragic suicide to those of Sylvia Plath, Edie Sedgwick, and Marilyn Monroe, women whose beauty was an end, ultimately, in itself.  Wurtzel, writing about the wife/mistress dichotomy, explains how some women are anointed as wife material, while others are relegated to the role of mistress.  She takes to task the double standard imposed on women, the cultural insistence on goodness and society's complete obsession with badness: what's a girl to do?  Let's face it, if women were any real threat to male power, "Gennifer Flowers would be sitting behind the desk of the Oval Office," writes Wurtzel, "and Bill Clinton would be a lounge singer in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock."

Bitch tells a tale both celebratory and cautionary as Wurtzel catalogs some of the most infamous women in history, defending their outsize desires, describing their exquisite loneliness, championing their take-no-prisoners approach to life and to love.  Whether writing about Courtney Love, Sally Hemings, Bathsheba, Kimba Wood, Sharon Stone, Princess Di--or waxing eloquent on the hideous success of The Rules, the evil that is The Bridges of Madison County, the twisted logic of You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again--Wurtzel is back with a bitchography that cuts to the core.  In prose both blistering and brilliant, Bitch is a treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation and a triumph of pussy power..
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The last freelance P.I. on earth, Zach Johnson has been hired to track down a young beauty who happens to be a deadly secret weapon for the World Council Figuring girls just want to have fun, he follows Natasha to various vacation destinations, but she eludes him, leaving a trail of destruction in her wake.

Zach, however, isn’t surprised to discover that things aren’t what they seem, and to save the world, he’s going to have to find a way to team up with the woman he’s supposed to destroy....
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After a full day slinging hash at Kountry Kitchen and then surviving the graveyard shift at Budget Mart, the last thing Wanda Nell Culpepper needs is to to find her no-account ex-husband, Bobby Ray, flashing cash and stirring up trouble. Things can't get much worse--until the next day when she finds her missing pink flamingo stuck in his very dead body..
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"Fatale: How French Women Do It" peeks at the mysterious ways Frenchwomen manage to appear sexy, smart and recklessly chic. Clues unmask the delicious deceptions plotted by Frenchwomen while suggesting how contemporary women can flirt like a coquette, charm like a courtesan and emit sensuality with cool confidence by merely adjusting one's attitude and one's garter belt. For those who savor French finesse and style, this book serves up lessons and advice to feast upon from historical and present-day femme fatales..
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In this road map to restoring feminine sexual power, Betsy Prioleau introduces and analyzes the stories and stratagems of history’s greatest seductresses. These are the women who ravished the world—from such classic figures as Cleopatra and Mae West to such lesser-known women as the infamous Violet Gordon Woodhouse, who lived in a ménage with four men. Smarts, imagination, courage, and killer charm helped these love maestras claim the men of their choice and keep them fascinated for life. Through an exposé of their secrets, Seductress provides an authoritative, empowering guide to erotic sovereignty..
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Laura Hunt was the ideal modern woman: beautiful, elegant, highly ambitious, and utterly mysterious. No man could resist her charms-not even the hardboiled NYPD detective sent to find out who turned her into a faceless corpse. As this tough cop probes the mystery of Laura's death, he becomes obsessed with her strange power. Soon he realizes he's been seduced by a dead woman-or has he?

Laura won lasting renown as an Academy Award-nominated 1944 film, the greatest noir romance of all time. Vera Caspary's equally haunting novel is remarkable for its stylish, hardboiled writing, its electrifying plot twists, and its darkly complex characters-including a woman who stands as the ultimate femme fatale.

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Created by comics legend Will Eisner, the blue-suited crimefighter known as The Spirit starred in hundreds of newspaper adventure stories that thrilled readers, and Eisner’s groundbreaking style utilized the comics format to its greatest strengths.

With Frank Miller's movie version of Will Eisner's THE SPIRIT set to hit theatres in December, DC Comics collects some of the most memorable stories pitting The Spirit against his most sultry opponents! Featuring 23 selected tales of mystery originally published between 1940 and 1949, these stories star P'Gell, Sand Saref, Saree, Silk Satin, Thorne Strand, Autumn Mews and many others..
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