BOOKS: THIS DICK IS A JANE

THE CROSS-CULTURAL HEROINE OF THE JANE WHITEFIELD SERIES CAN BREAK A GUY'S HEART AS WELL AS HIS LEG

Perils lurk for the male thriller writer giddy enough to cast a woman as the hero of a biff-bam adventure series. Just how hard can she bop the bad guys without coming off as an ape in drag? And how much can she fiddle with makeup or fret over runny panty hose before a reader of either sex decides that yeah, yeah, too much verisimilitude is unreal?

Novelist Thomas Perry's answers (which seem to be, respectively, "quite hard" and "not much") have carried him handily through three highly readable if not altogether believable episodes in the career of Jane Whitefield, a...

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