Kelly Oliver Delivers With Girl-Power Action

Posted on | by Marissa DeCuir

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Explosive Conclusion to Cowgirl Philosopher Mystery Trilogy Offers Killer Suspense, Humor, and White-Knuckle Girl-Power Action

Mystery author and Vanderbilt University philosophy professor Kelly Oliver is releasing the explosive final installment to her award-winning Cowgirl Philosopher Mystery Trilogy, featuring kickass heroines taking on ripped-from-the-headlines issues like date-rape on college campuses, sex trafficking, and fracking. The series (which can be read together or as standalone novels) offers up an epic conclusion with FOX (Kaos Press, Paperback $11.99, E-book $4.99, May 1, 2017), in which Jessica and her friends must combat insidious black market sales of Ivy League women’s eggs.

FOX: When Jessica James wakes up half naked behind a dumpster in downtown Chicago, she thinks the hot intern feeding her Fiery Mule Slammers slipped her a Mickey. But after a pattern of similar incidents around Northwestern Research Hospital, Jessica realizes she wasn’t raped, she was robbed. Robbed of something as valuable as life itself. Hunting for the predator drugging and dumping Ivy League co-eds, Jessica discovers secrets about her own identity that force her to rethink her past. The solution to the mystery lies in the cowgirl philosopher’s boot-cut genes.

The “dumpster girls” are all top of their class, attractive, college girls, who are drugged and dropped behind dumpsters with tiny mysterious incisions in their vaginal walls. The police are baffled. When a girl turns up dead, armed with her quick wit, cowgirl grit, and philosophy, it’s up to Jessica to solve the mystery to save herself and her friends before they become the next victims.

In Kelly Oliver’s stunning page-turner, Jessica and her friends must fight not just for their own lives, but also for the very future of human life.

WOLF (Kaos Press, Paperback $11.99, E-book $4.99, June 2016): Montana cowgirl Jessica James’ professor Wolfgang “Wolf” Schumtzig is found dead in his office, the murder weapon turns out to be a campus date-rape drug, supplied by the Russian mafia—and Jessica could be the next target. Jessica and mafia heir Dmitry team up to wrangle mobsters, encounter a trio of feminist avengers, and lasso frat boys in order to rope in a murderer who’s read too much Existentialism. Together, the brooding Russian and the cowgirl philosopher learn that sometimes virtue is just the flip side of vice. Wolf is a 2016 Foreword INDIES finalist in the mystery category.

COYOTE (Kaos Press, Paperback $11.99, E-book $4.99, August 2016): After her cousin dies in a gruesome accident at the lumber mill, Jessica is pulled into a fight against the corruption and greed ignited by the oil frenzy on the Montana plains. Her roommate, Kimi RedFox is determined to stop powerful Knight Industries from drilling oil on the Blackfoot Indian Reservation. Corrupt Richard Knight has assigned his younger brother David to oversee fracking operations on the Blackfeet reservation. But is the handsome young businessman his brother’s henchman or his dupe? And, will Jessica and Kimi quit sparring long enough to team up and expose sex trafficking, prostitution rings, and murder schemes involving some of the biggest frackers in the country? Or, will they become the murder’s next victims?

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HUNTING GIRLS

hunting-girls-coverSexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape

Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games), Bella Swan (Twilight), Tris Prior (Divergent), and other strong and resourceful characters have decimated the fairytale archetype of the helpless girl waiting to be rescued. Giving as good as they get, these young women access reserves of aggression to liberate themselves—but who truly benefits? By meeting violence with violence, are women turning victimization into entertainment? Are they playing out old fantasies, institutionalizing their abuse?

In Hunting Girls, Kelly Oliver examines popular culture’s fixation on representing young women as predators and prey and the implication that violence—especially sexual violence—is an inevitable, perhaps even celebrated, part of a woman’s maturity. To underscore the threat of these depictions, Oliver locates their manifestation of violent sex in the growing prevalence of campus rape, the valorization of woman’s lack of consent, and the new urgency to implement affirmative consent apps and policies.

 

Praise for HUNTING GIRLS

“Corpse chic, mounted trophy, dead girl, tough girl — Kelly Oliver explores media representations of a new empowered heroine in her compelling exploration of the dark side of the modern fairytale and its fascination with violence and rape. Oliver asks the reader to think seriously about the forces that drive rape culture and the eroticization of violence. A challenging, disturbing and enlightening book.” —Barbara Creed, University of Melbourne

“Oliver’s brilliant analysis of how young girls’ path to woman-hood is filled with beating, battery, abuse and sexual assault is shocking and timely. Oliver’s meticulously researched volume moves back and forth between myths and fairy tales linked to rape, contemporary films, TV shows and ads featuring violence to girls, along with studying rape culture, and ambiguities of ‘consent’, on college campuses. It is essential reading, showing that women may not have liberated themselves after all.” —E. Ann Kaplan, Stony Brook University

 

ABOUT KELLY OLIVER

KELLY OLIVER is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and well-known feminist philosopher.  She is the author of thirteen scholarly books, ten anthologies, and over 100 articles. Her work has been translated into seven languages, and she has published in The New York Times.  She has been interviewed on ABC television news, various radio programs, and is a member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. Learn more at KellyOliverBooks.com.