Zelda Popkin solves her intriguing mystery with a female detective named Mary Carner. Death Wears A White Gardenia is the first of a series of mystery novels featuring young, and pretty Mary Carner, a trained investigator on the security staff of a major department store in New York City in the late thirties and early forties. Mary Carner is analytical, intuitive, direct, tactful, independent, and receptive. Her character, emerging when it did, challenged the male gender-role stereotyping that for many years was all there was in detective fiction. By now, however, the female detective has found her place and is much admired in literature, film, and television.

Zelda Popkin's Mary Carner was before her time. She emerges here again, a fully-conceived woman, a fully-conceived professional so we can see that today's female detectives, like Jessica Fletcher and V. I. Warshawski, follow in the footsteps that Zelda Popkin's Mary Carner marked so well.

From the St. Louis Jewish Light:Zelda F. Popkin, was a novelist, magazine writer, publicist, and author of fourteen books, including her autobiography, Open Every Door. She was born in New York on July 5, 1898. She became the first woman general assignment reporter on the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader at the age of 17. She left the Times Leader in 1917 to attend the Columbia University School of Journalism for two years. In 1919 she married Louis Popkin and worked with him in the public relations business until his death in 1943. During this same period she wrote for a number of magazines including Survey, the New Yorker, Parents and American Hebrew. She has also been published in Readers Digest. Death Wears a White Gardenia, her first novel, was published during this period. Many of her books have been published in French and German.

Other books include Quiet Street, based on the siege of Jerusalem during the Israeli War of Independence and dramatized on television by NBC, Death of Innocence which became a CBS made-for-television movie and Herman had Two Daughters and Dear Once which both deal with Jewish life in America.