Ladies' Night

by Naomi Hirahara

From Valley Girls to Valley of the Dolls, the L.A. Woman has captured our imagination and redefined the fairer sex. CJ Parker is our lifeguard, Lucy Arnaz, our studio executive, Angelyne, our reality star, and the Black Dahlia, our murder victim. L.A. neighborhoods have spawned the Beverly Hills housewife, the Hollywood starlet, the Van Nuys dominatrix, the Santa Monica Surf Betty and the Manson girls, to name a few. LADIES' NIGHT, an anthology by Sisters in Crime Los Angeles, includes stories by Julie G. Beers, Julie Brayton, Sarah M. Chen, Arthur Coburn, L.H. Dillman, Bengte Evenson, Cyndra Gernet, Andrew Jetarski, Micheal Kelly, Susan Kosar-Beery, Jude McGee, Gigi Pandian and Wendall Thomas. The anthology is edited by Naomi Hirahara, Kate Thornton and Jeri Westerson. Award winning L.A. crime novelist Denise Hamilton wrote the introduction.

228 pages, Paperback

First published May 11, 2015

About the author

Naomi Hirahara is the USA Today-bestselling and award-winning author of multiple mystery series, noir short stories, nonfiction history books and one middle-grade novel. Her Edgar Award-winning Mas Arai series features a Los Angeles gardener and Hiroshima survivor. Her first historical mystery, CLARK AND DIVISION, which follows a Japanese American family from Manzanar to Chicago in 1944, won a Mary Higgins Clark Award in 2022. Her two other series star a young mixed race female LAPD bicycle cop, Ellie Rush, and a Filipina-Japanese American woman in Kaua'i, Lellani Santiago. She also has written a middle-grade book, 1001 CRANES. In 2025, the history book she co-wrote with Geraldine Knatz, TERMINAL ISLAND: LOST COMMUNITIES ON AMERICA'S EDGE, won a California Book Award gold medal. She, her husband and their rat terrier live happily in her birthplace of Pasadena, California.

Reviews

[Melinda Loomis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published by the Los Angeles Chapter of Sisters in Crime, LAdies' Night is a collection of short crime stories featuring a variety of L.A. women who find themselves in dangerous and sometimes deadly situations.

The stories run the gamut, from Hollywood at the birth of sound to a post-apocalyptic San Fernando Valley of the future, from a Venice artist faking her own death to a vengeful Laurel Canyon wife, from a old-time movie star who returns from the dead to a murdered movie mogul, from a strip mall in Encino to a Malibu beach house. It's Los Angeles in all its many forms and the colorful denizens who make their homes, their dreams and sometimes their downfall here. It's a terrific, lively collection that I read in one sitting.