Dead Land by Sara Paretsky: A review

Can this really be the twentieth in the V.I. Warshawski series? It seems like only yesterday that I was reading the first in the series, Indemnity Only. But that book was published in 1982 and I read it probably within a year, so, yes, Paretsky has been writing these books for almost forty years and I have been reading them for almost that long.

The wonderful and unusual thing about this series is that the quality has stayed consistent. In a long series, you almost always get one or two books that are real clunkers. Not with Sara Paretsky. I've read them all and I can't think of a single one that wasn't good. Sure, there have been some that I've liked better than others, but there's not a one that hasn't been good and a worthwhile read.

Another great thing about the series is that V.I. has been allowed to age naturally and she has grown and learned things throughout the series. She's had many romantic relationships over the years, and now she is involved with an archaeologist. I remember Agatha Christie's comment about being married to an archaeologist that the older you get the more interesting you are to them. So perhaps this relationship of V.I. and the archaeologist will last.

And yet another thing that I like about this series is that Paretsky is never afraid to tackle difficult and complicated subjects and she and her detective have a clear and unwavering moral compass. That moral compass guides Warshawski to fight for the underdog and to oppose injustice and sharp practice wherever it occurs. Living and working in Chicago, she has her work cut out for her. 

The plot of Dead Land is even more complicated than usual, involving an attempted land grab in Chicago that is somehow connected to a mass shooting that occurred in Kansas a few years before and a rich and politically connected family in Chile. How Paretsky weaves all of these disparate strands together into a tapestry that presents an understandable picture is a joy to read.

Another side note: It is interesting (to me at least) that Paretsky grew up in Kansas and her recent books have worked a Kansas connection into the plot.

This one starts with a nighttime call to Warshawski from her goddaughter, Bernie, who has been arrested following a disturbance at a public meeting regarding a plan for the development of a Chicago park area. Warshawski goes to her rescue and thus becomes involved with Bernie and her current boyfriend who is a computer geek working as a volunteer for a community group called SLICK that is involved in the development plans. And things spiral from there.

A famous singer/songwriter is found living on the streets and it turns out she has been traumatized and is unable to speak or function normally because of that mass shooting I mentioned. It was at a festival in Kansas and she and her lover, a Chilean-American were performing when the shooting took place. Her lover and several other people were killed and many others were injured. In her current situation, she is watched over by a mysterious man named Coop and his dog Bear who seem to be the only ones she trusts and interacts with.

That Chilean-American was the nephew and heir of that powerful Chilean family and he had wanted to turn the mines owned by the family over to the miners. This was not a popular stance among other members of the family.

Back in Chicago, the land grab involves repurposing some public lands for the convenience of the rich and powerful. "Pay to play" Chicago politics is at the heart of the dastardly plan.

All of this finally comes together and makes sense, although some of it is a bit of a stretch I admit. And in the process V.I. is shot at and missed but otherwise injured on more than one occasion. That just makes her more implacable and relentless.

V.I. may have lost a step but she is still formidable in her passion for justice. She is a worthy hero for our times.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars        

Shell Game by Sara Paretsky: A review

Sara Paretsky is one of my long-time literary crushes. I've been reading her V.I. Warshawski novels since almost their beginning back in the 1980s. She has never let me down. Oh, sure, I have enjoyed some of the books more than others, but there is not a stinker among them.

One of the things that I enjoy about V.I. is that she has been allowed to age, more or less in real time. By now (and the present book takes place in the present time - the Trump era) she's getting a bit long in the tooth, not unlike many of us, but her passion for justice and for serving her clients with honor remains undimmed.

Her latest case involves a heady mix of stock scams and painstakingly detailed insurance fraud by high rollers, the scapegoating and demonizing of immigrants (particularly Middle Eastern immigrants), an out-of-control ICE, theft of archaeological treasures, Russian mobsters, kidnapping and sexual abuse of young girls, and, of course, murder.

It's the murder that initially gets V.I. involved in all the rest of this muck. The body of a murdered man with no identification on him has been found in a nature preserve area outside of Chicago. The Cook County Sheriff's Office has jurisdiction over the investigation. The only clue they find on the body is a scrap of paper bearing the name and phone number of Felix Herschel. Felix is the grand-nephew of Lotty Herschel, V.I.'s friend, doctor, and mother-figure. Sheriff's deputies take Felix to look at the body to see if he can identify it and Lotty contacts V.I. to go along.

Felix denies knowing the dead person, but he seems to be hiding something and V.I. follows him and sees him meet a young woman of Middle Eastern appearance. She turns out to be Syrian, a recent refugee from the civil war there and she is the daughter of an honored poet who is in the country illegally. Felix seems to be trying to protect them.

The dead man is eventually identified as Leroy (or Lawrence) Fausson, an archaeology student who had worked at digs in the Middle East and was captivated by the culture of that area. He often dressed as an Arab and wanted to be called Lawrence, or Elorenze, as in Lawrence of Arabia. It develops that he had probably stolen a priceless antiquity.

Meantime, in a parallel plot, V.I. is contacted by Harmony Seale, whose late mother was the sister of Warshawski's long-ago husband, Richard Yarborough. V.I. had not seen the girl since she was 5 or 6 years old, but now she is grown up and needs help. Her older sister, Reno, had recently moved to Chicago from Portland and found a job, but now she has disappeared. Harmony refuses to go to the police because she doesn't trust them. She wants V.I. to find her.

V.I. looks for clues and tries to work both the cases and at some point they begin to grow together in an intricately woven pattern. She has a problem following or developing the clues that she finds because she keeps getting attacked by two monstrously large and implacable Slavic thugs. 

Of course, V.I. is pretty implacable herself and we know she's not going to give up.

It's fairly obvious pretty early on who the prime villain is here, but that knowledge does not in any way detract from the pleasure of reading this story. The plot is meticulously worked out in the most minute detail including a lot of information about insurance and stocks that frankly goes over my head, but I'm able to follow along and get the gist and, as usual, it is the characters and their relationships that keep me turning the pages. Particularly the new and intriguing relationship between V.I. and a certain archaeologist from the Oriental Institute.

What can I say? V.I. just gets better and better. This one was definitely one of my favorites in the series.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fallout by Sara Paretsky: A review

Oh, V.I. Warshawski, how I've missed you! It seems an age since we had our last adventure, although, in truth, it has only been two years since we solved the mystery of Brush Back together. But what a pleasure it is to be once again in your company.

I've been making these periodic visits to Warshawski-World since the 1980s when Sara Paretsky started this series. Paretsky, Warshawski, and I have aged together through the years. There are a few more gray hairs among the blonde on Warshawski's head these days and, if the truth be told, on mine as well. 

But Warshawski is still the wiry, fit detective that we first met in Indemnity Only all those years ago. And she's still the same indomitable, uncompromising seeker after truth that we've come to know and admire in that and all the subsequent seventeen V.I. books. She only gets better with age and experience.

In Fallout, V.I. leaves the comfort zone that she knows so well, Chicago, and heads out to Lawrence, Kansas, searching for an actress and a videographer who have disappeared there. The actress is Emerald Ferring, who grew up (as did Sara Paretsky) in Lawrence, and the young videographer is August Veriden, who is a cousin of Angela Creedy, a teammate of Bernadine Fouchard, goddaughter of V.I. who we met in Brush Back. Got all that?

Bernadine (Bernie) and Angela want V.I. to go to Lawrence to find the two who have gone missing and Vic finds a paying customer willing to make it worth her while to take the case. And so she makes the drive to Lawrence with her dog, Peppy, as company. (Her other dog, Mitch, gets to stay in Chicago, and be boarded.) 

Lawrence proves to be a close-knit, close-mouthed community with a racial divide. African-Americans live mostly on one side of town while white people live on the other. The two people that Vic is looking for are African-American and she finds Kansans very suspicious of her and hesitant to share any information. Moreover, she has no resources in Kansas to fall back on. Even the local police seem unwilling to cooperate in any way in looking for Emerald and August.

The body count begins to mount and Vic uncovers some local secrets that everyone would prefer remained secret, including information about biochemical weapons research that was conducted in the county back in the 1950s. She discovers a right-wing militia group that is active in the area, as well government officials who may be trying to cover up a disaster that took place during the biochemical weapons research. But she's making no progress on finding her missing persons.

Meanwhile, on the personal front, her lover Jake, the jazz musician, is touring in Europe and wanted Vic to go with him. When she went to Kansas instead, he was seriously put out and it looks as though the relationship may not survive. Poor Vic! She never did have very good luck with men.

This is one of Paretsky's more complicated plots, but she never falters and it all comes together and makes sense in the end. And as always, there are clues strewn through the text for the sharp-eyed reader. I was right there with her all the way through, enjoying every minute of the story. This may be my favorite of all the Warshawski books. If not, it's right near the top.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Brush Back by Sara Paretsky: A review

Brush Back by Sara Paretsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A sure way to get V.I. Warshawski's attention is to cast aspersions on the character of her beloved family, especially her adored mother and father and her favorite cousin, Boom-Boom the hockey player. In Brush Back, all three of these now long-dead loved ones are attacked by a harridan of a former neighbor named Stella Guzzo and that sends V.I. into action.

Stella is the mother of Frank Guzzo, a high school sweetheart of V.I. The mother always hated and was jealous of V.I.'s family who she accused of thinking they were better than anybody else in their South Chicago neighborhood. The fact that they probably were just lent fuel to the flame of her hatred.

Stella was a violent mother who beat her children and she was convicted of beating her daughter, Annie, to death. She spent 25 years in prison for the young woman's murder and, as we enter this story, she's out and causing trouble again, even though she's almost eighty.

Her son, Frank, visits V.I. and asks her to help with his mother's claim for exoneration. Yes, she now claims she didn't kill her daughter. V.I. is very reluctant but feels sorry for her old friend and finally agrees. However, when she goes to interview Stella, things go completely awry. The old woman attacks her physically and afterwards she contacts the media to claim that she has a diary of her daughter's that implicates Boom-Boom in her murder. That, of course, is a challenge that V.I. can't ignore and she is egged on by her goddaughter, Bernie, who is staying with her.

Investigating Stella's claims opens a very unsavory can of worms with the biggest worms being the movers and shakers of Chicago's and Illinois' corrupt politics. Furthermore, those corrupt politicians have links with the Uzbeki Mob which is very active in Chicago and which is utterly ruthless. The chances of V.I. uncovering the truth and getting out alive seem very slim indeed.

The plot of this one is almost too complicated to follow, featuring multi-generational family trees, as well as incestuous connections between politicians and the Mob and Chicago street gangs, all of whom are eager to beat up V.I. There's also a connection to the Cubs and the eventual answer to the mystery is (or was) hidden in the bowels of Wrigley Field.

As a baseball fan, I was delighted with the connections to the game and the fact that most of the chapter titles as well as the title of the book featured baseball terms. A brush back pitch in baseball is designed to get the batter off the plate, make him nervous, and maybe redirect his attention. It's a good metaphor for what V.I.'s enemies try to do to her.

V.I. is getting a bit long in the tooth and maybe slowing down a bit at 50, but she's still the high-energy, sarcastic, smack-talking, working class P.I. that readers have come to know over the years. She takes guff from no one and doesn't hesitate to bend the rules if they get in her way. At the same time, she is loyal to her adoptive family of Mr. Contreras, the two golden retrievers, and her lover, Jake, and maintains her contacts with friends in the media and the police department and a few old friends from the neighborhood.

V.I. is utterly tenacious in her search for the truth, even if she suspects she's not going to be paid to find it. If I were in trouble and needed the help of an investigator, she's the P.I. I would want on my case.




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Critical Mass by Sara Paretsky: A review

Critical Mass by Sara Paretsky
My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

I've long been an admirer of the writing of Sara Paretsky. As such, I have faithfully followed her V.I. Warshawski series over the years. Having now finished with Critical Mass, I can say that I have read them all.

They are all workmanlike and suspenseful mysteries and some are downright enthralling page-turners, but I have to admit that I was less than enthralled with this latest one. While I really like V.I. and I'll always care about her, I found it hard to care very much about the other characters in this book.

The story here is that V.I.'s friend Lotty hires her to look for a drug-addicted patient of hers who had called her in a panic to ask for help and then disappeared. The detective tracks her to a derelict drug house in a rural town outside of Chicago. She finds the place in shambles and the body of one dead dog with another injured and extremely dehydrated. She follows a trail into a cornfield where she discovers the corpse of a man that had been picked over and mutilated by crows. But the woman whom she is seeking is no longer there, if she ever was.  

Trying to discover more about the woman and get an idea of where she might be brings V.I., quite unexpectedly, into the history of physics and invention, dating to before World War II. The woman's family history is linked to Dr. Lotty Herschel's all the way back to the Vienna of seventy years ago. Both families were touched by the Holocaust, indeed they were decimated by it. Lotty and the mother of the missing woman had been children together at the time and were sent to England to escape the war.

The grandmother of the missing woman was a physicist with a connection to a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who escaped from Vienna with his family and ended up in the United States. The grandmother, Martina, was caught in the war and was sent to be a slave laborer for the Nazis. She later disappeared from all records and was presumed dead.

Martina had been a gifted physicist and inventor and she held the American patent for a machine that was later instrumental in developing modern computer systems. This, it turns out, is significant in the disappearance of her drug-addicted granddaughter in Chicago, as well as the granddaughter's twenty-something son who, it seems, has inherited his great-grandmother's love of and abilities with math and physics.

But what made these two disappear? Who are they hiding from, if indeed they are hiding? And what does it all have to do with the Holocaust and with Vienna of the 1930s and 1940s?

I had a hard time keeping track of all these people and their relations, as the action switched back and forth in time. Perhaps that was because there just didn't seem to be a strong central figure here. I think that role might have been meant for Martina and/or her great-grandson and namesake, Martin, but their plights just didn't engage me, at least not in any meaningful way.

Obviously, we are supposed to be moved by the Holocaust connection, but perhaps I am jaded (although I do fervently hope not) by the repetition of this particular theme in several of these books. V.I.'s friends, Lotty and Max, are both connected to the Holocaust and they work to succor Holocaust survivors and their descendants. But the continual repetition of the theme has only served to immunize me a bit from its effect.

In the end, of course, all the loose ends are tied up, V.I. gets her man, solves the case, and justice is served. But the whole thing just left me curiously unsatisfied.



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Breakdown by Sara Paretsky: A review

The famously cranky and snarky Chicago private investigator Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski is back with another quest in search of justice for the powerless and downtrodden. At age fifty, V.I. (Vic) does not seem to have mellowed one whit. Her outrage at injustice burns as brightly as ever. In Breakdown, there is plenty of injustice for her to confront. 

The story begins with her being called from a social gathering she's attending with her friend Murray. Her young cousin, Petra, is worried about a group of pre-teenage girls who were in her care. It seems that, under the spell of Carmilla, Queen of the Night, a fictional magical shape-shifting character who is a hero to the girls, they have slipped out at night to an old abandoned cemetery to perform an initiation ritual. Vic leaves her party and goes to the cemetery to round up the girls, but there, she finds more than she bargained for. Near where the girls are performing their ritual is the body of a murdered man with a stake through his heart lying on a tomb. And thus the adventure begins. 

One of the girls in the group was the granddaughter of a billionaire survivor of the Holocaust. He is supporting a liberal candidate, a family friend, for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. On the opposite side of the political divide is a cable news network that specializes in giving a radical right-wing slant to all its "news" stories. Its biggest star is Wade Lawlor, a Glenn Beck type character, who rants and rages and cries on camera and has a huge and devoted following. The "news" network and Lawlor are out to destroy Chaim Salanter, the Holocaust survivor, and his candidate for the Senate. To bring about that destruction, they are trying to dig up dirt from the past of Salanter. 

Vic gets involved further when a call from an old friend, a brilliant but mentally erratic lawyer, brings her to a meeting, but she arrives too late and finds her friend crumpled in a heap and almost dead, apparently having jumped from a high place. But something doesn't add up and Vic keeps digging which brings her to a state mental hospital where her friend had been a recent resident. Her investigation keeps turning up anomalies and strange links between events and she begins to suspect that everything is related. 

Sara Paretsky's plots are always complicated and are overlaid with a strong political point of view. It's one of the things that I enjoy most about her writing. Moreover, her V.I. Warshawski has changed and grown over the years. She has constructed an extended "family" for herself consisting of Mr. Contreras her elderly neighbor, the dogs Mitch and Peppy, her young cousin Petra, and Jake her neighbor with whom she has established a fairly stable (for her) romantic relationship. And, of course, there are always Lotty and Max, themselves Holocaust survivors, who are Vic's oldest and staunchest friends and Murray Ryerson, the journalist with whom she has long worked and who is now being pushed out of his job by the news mogul who owns the right-wing network. All of these characters play strong roles in the present mystery. 

Paretsky is a very good writer and her stories always seem torn from today's headlines. It's been that way from the beginning of this series in 1982 with Indemnity Only. I've read all eighteen of the books in the series and it has been fascinating to watch the progression of V.I. Warshawski's life and career. Throughout it all, now thirty years later, she and her creator have retained their edge. 

Paretsky's is not really escapist fiction, but stories that are designed to make the reader stop and consider what is actually happening in the real world. It's the kind of fiction which one probably either loves or hates. I happen to love it.

Body Work by Sara Paretsky: A review

V.I. Warshawski, Sara Paretsky's Chicago private detective, is one tough woman. Those bad guys who try to intimidate her soon learn that such tactics only strengthen her resolve. She takes a licking and keeps on ticking, and she never, ever gives up on a client.

The opening of this latest book, Body Work, finds V.I. at a club in Chicago where a performance artist who bills herself as the Body Artist is doing her thing. Her "thing" involves appearing naked on stage and allowing members of the audience to draw or write on her body. Everything proceeds about as you would expect in the circumstances until a young woman who is obviously a talented artist starts to draw. What she draws is a woman's face surrounded by flames and by an enigmatic symbol. Her drawing seems to enrage a young Iraq War veteran in the audience who reacts violently before his friends can calm him. A few days later, the woman who drew the picture lies dying in the alley near the club, after having been shot. She is cradled in her dying moments by V.I. Warshawski.

Soon, the police go to arrest the young man who had been disturbed by the drawings. But when they get there, they find him unconscious with a gun that proves to be the murder weapon on his pillow. He remains unconsious and is taken to the hospital under police custody. Did he try to commit suicide or was he deliberately poisoned, causing his coma? And has he been framed for the woman's murder?

The man's parents believe he would have been incapable of shooting the woman and they hire V.I. to prove that. As she digs into the case, she finds that the woman who died had an older sister who died in Iraq while working for one of the contractors there. Was there a connection between this older sister and the suspect in the sister's murder?

Things get more and more complicated when Warshawski uncovers evidence that the death in Iraq may not have been what it first seemed and she finds that the dead sisters came from a dysfunctional family that has suffered multiple tragedies. Were they all somehow related?

This is a complicated story that seems ripped right out of today's headlines about the Iraq war and the role of contractors in it.

Paretsky and her alter ego, Warshawski, have a strong interest in and concern about issues related to women, especially violence against women, and that concern is woven through this story. Paretsky skillfully keeps the reader guessing until very near the end and then she brings all the disparate strands of the story together to create the complete picture.

The problem is that the bad guys here are very rich people and very rich people tend to buy their way out of trouble. In the end, Warshawski is able to serve her client well and bring about a kind of justice, but not enough. One is left not really wanting the book to end and wanting very much to know what Warshawski's next case will be.