The Nature of Things

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 wi...

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....

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, ...

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...

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 di...

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 st...

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 b...