An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit.
A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.
One of the great problems with Americans is that - being a decent people - they assume that everyone else is equally decent.