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.