One of the things we critics, and readers, quickly learn is that there’s no copyright for book titles.

So it’s not uncommon to see several books, each with a different approach, but with the same title. And to have that title work for each of those books.

The same is with book jackets.

It’s not uncommon to see the same theme in a book jacket on several different books.

And each of those artists was working independent of each other. (Truth be told, the same occurs with critics; many of us will say the same thing and no one has peeked.)

So we now we have the month of the woman running in a red coat.

Three novels, that I know of, each use the motif of a retreating woman wearing a red coat.

And, yes, each of these mysteries are totally different and, yes, the woman in red works well to set the tone for each novel.

Hank Phillippi Ryan’s political thriller The Other Woman features a woman wearing a longish red coat running on a bridge. There are a lot of "other women" in Ryan’s novel.

In my review of The Other Woman, I said that “Politics, dirty campaigns and compromised candidates are a compelling plot foundation in any year, but especially in this presidential election year. Ryan combines both a timely tale and a multi-layered plot with gripping suspense. The Other Woman works well as a political thriller and romantic suspense, delving into political and journalism ethics. “

Michael Robotham’s Say You’re Sorry has the woman in red running through the snow. In this thriller, the British author looks at the disappearance of two popular young women. Three years after they vanish during the century’s worst blizzard, a troubled young man claims that he remembers the night the women disappeared. And that he saw one of them being chased by a snowman.

A woman wearing a short red coat faces a city skyscape in Keigo Higashino’s Salvation of a Saint. This Japanese author made an impact last year with his novel The Devotion of Suspect X, which garnered an Edgar nomination.

Salvation of a Saint already has received a couple of starred reviews.

In Salvation of a Saint, the logical suspect in a husband’s death by poisoning is his wife, whom he was going to leave. But the wife was hundreds of miles away when he sipped that coffee; plus she’s considered to be a “saint” by nearly everyone.

Each of these novels was published by a different publisher.

I have a theory on why these covers are so similar. Great minds think alike!