Review of Hardball by Sara Paretsky

From Blogcritics Books --

Book Review Hardball By Sara Paretsky --

By: Lynn Voedisch --
Mar 12, 2010 --

Sara Paretsky is one of our great living crime fiction treasures. Having penned such taut mysteries as Deadlock, Indemnity Only, Burn Marks and (my favorite) Guardian Angel , she established herself as a star of the gumshoe set. Even a movie, V.I. Warshawski starring Kathleen Turner, was based on her novels. But it was roundly (and correctly) panned. Even Paretsky doesn't want to talk about it. It doesn't detract from her literary legacy.



However, just as Paretsky was riding high, she suddenly took a bizarre turn, infusing her novels with heavy themes of social injustice. The themes became more than background and readers felt they were being lectured. The Holocaust, the homeless, the prison system, enough! Where was plucky detective "Vic" Warshawsky when readers needed her, zooming around Chicago in a variety of beat-up cars, living on the edge of poverty, but still solving the case?

Paretsky tried magical realism (while lecturing readers about homelessness) with Ghost Country, an enormous flop, then was absorbed in self-analysis in the painful Bleeding Kansas, about her puritanical upbringing. Still no mysteries. Many figured another talent had been lost.

Hardball marked her triumphant return to the murder-and-mayhem business, and V.I. Warshawsky is back. The novel is a true return to style, yet it also allows her to delve into racial wrongs of the past without sermonizing. Paretsky, a transplant to Chicago, really delves into Chicago of the 1960s, when Dr. Martin Luther King, came to visit, and the "white ethnics," as they were called, started a riot at Marquette Park on the South Side. Without having lived through it, she presents an amazingly accurate picture of the times, with agonized lakefront liberals wringing their hands and trying to do right, while poorer whites worried about their jobs and being forced out of their neighborhoods.

V.I. is summoned by a dying relative to find the identity of a black kid who disappeared during those riots and must delve into some neighborhoods that — to this day — are no place for Caucasians to tread. Plucky Washawsky does anyway, and, as always, earns a lot of disfavor among the populace. Plus, she's also not getting any information. A jailed gangbanger just plays her for a fool, and her client's sister starts claiming that she's a fraud.

However, things start adding up quickly when Warshawksy opens a trunk once packed by her late father, a former Chicago cop. In it is a major-league-style baseball studded with nails — a lethal thing. What's it doing there? Her father played slow-pitch softball with the guys. Some contentious conversations with her prickly uncle leave her wondering if her father was completely in the right on the day of the Marquette Park riots, and for the first time she begins to doubt her hero father. After interviewing several retired cops who look to have gone crooked, she becomes more convinced that her dad wasn't all goodness and light.

Her father's possession of the hardball turns out to be much more than admission of his guilt, it's the key to corruption throughout the police department. Meant to be hurled at King's head, it killed a young girl instead. Now someone locked it up in Warshawsky's trunk to hide the whole sordid mess from view.

The social ramifications are highly resonant today, when police beatings of suspects often appear in newspaper reports. Hardball sheds light on a subject no one wants to look at but hides in ugly corners — probably in every city.

The plot is elegantly constructed, and, as always, the characters glow, especially the black South Siders, who slowly let Vic into their lives.

This one hits it out of the park.

Interview with Sara Paretsky

From Telegraph (UK)--

Sara Paretsky: Interview --

By Jake Kerridge --
12 Mar 2010 --

As her new crime novel hits the streets, Sara Paretsky tells Jake Kerridge about her headstrong heroine, VI Warshawski



Over the course of 13 novels about the ball-breaking private investigator V I Warshawski, there’s barely a square inch of her adopted Chicago that Sara Paretsky hasn’t written about. But she finds her excursions round the city somewhat circumscribed these days.

“I used to take people and show them the house I based V I’s childhood home on,” she tells me, “but the last time I did that I took a French camera crew. We were surrounded suddenly by a gang who wanted to take their video equipment. It used to be that if you showed up with a video camera, even the toughest kids would want to be filmed and get on television, but now… A change for the worse in America!” she adds, adopting the tone of Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’s Kansan cousin, before collapsing into giggles.

From the smart hotel lounge we’re sitting in, we can see the garden walls of Buckingham Palace, so it’s a slightly incongruous location in which to hear Paretsky’s jaunty tales about dodging drug dealers every time she takes her dog to the park back home. She is noticeably less jolly when talking about another group she considers to be a public menace: the police.

“I have an African-American woman friend who was waiting at a bus stop recently. Suddenly a squad car pulled up and she was flung to the ground, her hands pinned behind her, because a filling station had been held up six blocks away, supposedly by a black man, and she was the first black person they saw. I don’t have any African-American friends who don’t have similar stories.” You can tell when Paretsky is getting angry as her voice becomes lower and her speech more deliberate; the effect is slightly frightening.

But as she has pointed out, Chicago is a dangerous city and like many a middle-class white woman who disapproves of their methods, she knows that she relies on the police to protect her. It was mulling over her conflicted feelings on the subject that inspired Hardball, the latest Warshawski novel. Hired to trace a black man who has been missing for 40 years, V I uncovers evidence of extensive torture of black suspects by the Chicago police across decades. Could it be in the public interest for law officials and politicians to collude in hushing the matter up – as some have been accused of in recent high-profile, real-life cases?

The mystery turns out to be tied up with the Marquette Park riots of 1966, when Martin Luther King took part in a march to protest against the sardine-like conditions in which segregationist housing legislation forced black people to live, provoking an angry response from white working-class Chicagoans who feared encroachment on their territory. The author researched this period by living through it: King’s appearance in Chicago coincided with the arrival of the 19-year-old Sara Paretsky, finally escaped from her “oppressive” childhood home in Kansas and eager to get involved in community work.

“I don’t know how much of my generation’s hitting the streets was idealism and how much was, ‘ah, we don’t want to go to south-east Asia and get shot at’. But we did feel in the Sixties that we could make things so different, we could end this discrimination.” She worries about what will happen now that the baby boomers are getting too old to keep fighting. “It was kids who pushed for the civil rights movement. The ‘millen gen’ kids will say we do it differently now, we do it on the internet. Well, I’m sorry, blogs don’t change things.”

Paretsky’s novels have become steadily more politically engaged since Warshawski’s debut, Indemnity Only, in 1982, although she says her work has always been concerned with feminism. “What really galvanised me into writing was reading Chandler. In six of his seven novels the main villain is a woman who presents herself sexually.” So she came up with V I, a woman who has plenty of sex, not because she wants to exert power over men but because she actually likes them. “If I hadn’t had that chip on my shoulder I might never had gotten going.”

Having created one of fiction’s first female private eyes, she won more acclaim for her work promoting recognition of the novels of female crime writers and for withstanding the vilification of male authors who caricatured her as a man-hater. One almost feels sorry for them: this petite, elegantly dressed 62-year-old is a formidable opponent. The only time during our conversation when she doesn’t argue convincingly is when she tries to present herself as one of nature’s wishy-washies.

“I’m the sort of person who compromises constantly. I talk a good fight but I don’t fight the fight often. And I think that the voice that’s always in my head condemning me for these shortcomings ends up being V I’s voice. If somebody says: ‘Oh, help,’ she just drops what she’s doing and goes and helps them.”

A headstrong female knight-errant with a weakness for shoes and handbags: V I is a character so appealing that Paretsky has sold more than 10 million copies of her books worldwide. Readers write to commiserate with V I over the violence her creator inflicts on her; although in Hardball an encounter with a Molotov cocktail leaves her badly burned and almost blinded, she’s had worse days. “But women my age really love the fact that she’s out there able to be so physical when we’re all so useless.”

Not all her correspondents are concerned about V I’s welfare. “I got this weird letter from a man in the National Rifle Association who said I make so many mistakes about the use of firearms that I am clearly a Communist who wants to remove firearms from American hands because I was encouraging people to misuse them.” Her most famous fan, Bill Clinton, corresponds with her too, having begun by sending her a six-page handwritten reply to a letter she wrote about Bosnia.

“I wrote to Bush, too, saying very politely, get over yourself on abortion, and then got a letter back saying the President is so glad you share his beliefs and he’s sent you this photo suitable for framing. That was a good way to get me to stop writing.”

Her enthusiasm for Obama is sincere but qualified. “I wanted Obama to be like FDR, to be bold, take many chances, try many things, but he’s not that kind of person. Also, although FDR faced enormous opposition, it wasn’t like this very ideologically driven Republican rump. A lot of what’s driving the opposition is coded racism. He has less manoeuvring room than he would if he was white.”

Like her books, Paretsky is deeply gloomy and very funny. Those who think reading crime novels that tackle political issues is like being forced to eat broccoli with your Big Mac may not be pleased to learn that her next novel deals with Iraq; but in the past she has brought a light touch to books that have addressed 9/11 and the Holocaust.

“I’m not writing to add to people’s pain; I just hope I can make them laugh, too. My husband reads my early drafts and I sit there in the next room. It’s only when he starts laughing that I think, OK, it’s OK.”

‘Hardball’ is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £12.99

Interview with Sara Paretsky

From Independent (UK) --

Crimes of a century: Sara Paretsky on fiction, power and the open case of race in America --

By Arifa Akbar --
26 February 2010 --

Creator of feminist sleuth VI Warshawski, Sara Paretsky soon picked up the trail of her Chicago neighbour, Barack Obama



When Barack Obama was not yet the President of the United States but just another neighbour in Sara Paretsky's leafy corner of Chicago, she would glimpse the handsomely gangly figure of the young attorney tripping round the block, stopping for friendly chats here, idle shakes of the hand there.

After he embarked on his campaign for an Illinois Senate seat in 2004, her admiration turned into an unshakeable hunch - emanating more from womanly instinct than forensic detective work - that this "beautiful" man could attract the not-so-insignificant vote of her state's "soccer moms", if not the prune-faced majority who had already written him off as a "black guy with a weird name."

"I was one of the first people to back his Senate campaign," she says. "David Axelrod [now his senior adviser] held a fundraiser to put the arm on all of Chicago's wealthy Democrats. He invited everyone to his apartment, overlooking Lake Michigan, and all of rich Chicago society thought 'no-one's going to vote for this black guy with the weird name'. But I was sure as soon as the soccer moms see this guy, they'll vote for him... He was so beautiful." Chicago's doubting elite was proved wrong, Paretsky right. "He won the primary, like that, click," she says, recalling the victory with a delicate lick of the lips.

VI Warshawski, Paretsky's fictive feminist PI who in 1982 burst into the detective genre to subvert its patriarchal norms, would surely be proud. As a long-standing admirer of the President, perhaps it is no surprise that Paretsky features Obama in her latest novel, Hardball (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99) - albeit more as political wallpaper than as a central subject.

The story is a nostalgic one, revolving around the activism of Martin Luther King, in a return to the Chicago of 1966 and the bloody Marquette Park riots which erupted that year. King, despite having been granted police protection, was struck by bottles hurled by a snarling white crowd, who were trying to stop the civil rights march for non-segregated housing.

King himself barely features in the book. But his presence in Chicago ignites a terrible face-off between the resentful white community, activists, black street gangs who appointed themselves as King's protectors, and the questionable allegience of the state police. Warshawski's latest assignment leads her to excavate this turbulent moment in American civil-rights history after an elderly black woman asks her to find her son, whose sudden disappearance after the Marquette riots has to this day remained unsolved.

Obama is a shadow but a significant one, one whose photograph has already been hung next to the portraits of older heroes in the drawing rooms of the black families Warshawski visits. Paretsky suggests the timing of the book - finished in the final week of the presidential campaign - leaves it holding its breath, yet she still wanted to place Obama as a symbol of hope at the back of her story. "It was touch-and-go whether he would win. But I felt he was iconic. I was 13 when John F Kennedy was elected and there was that sense of a new generation, a new energy that Barack Obama embodied again."

The roots of Paretsky's 16th novel, and 13th in the Warshawski series, lie in a real-life case that has rumbled on in Chicago for two decades. The Burge case (named after detective Jon Burge, currently embroiled in the Federal courts for perjury), has become a shameful reference-point for endemic police corruption in the city.

A teenager, Joseph Lopez, was arrested in July 2000 without a warrant for the murder of a 12-year-old, and held for four days in an interrogation room, handcuffed to the wall for most of that time. Under these conditions, Lopez falsely confessed, but was later released when the real culprit was arrested. He sued the police and a subsequent inquiry uncovered a 20-year pattern within Chicago's police department of arresting young black men without a warrant in cases involving violent crimes, and detaining them illegally.

This case was one inspiration, she says, but Paretsky also used her own life's topography - her first few years in her adoptive city of Chicago as a student community-service worker - to give her crime fiction a typically politicised hard edge. The book was spawned from an essay she wrote for her 2007 non-fiction collection, Writing in an Age of Silence (Verso), "The King and I". It reflected on her community service of 1966 and her permanent return to the city, from her Kansas hometown, two years later, to work as a secretary. Later she completing a PhD at the University of Chicago.

The first trip as a student "changed my life", she wrote in "The King and I": "I feel a fierce nostalgia for the sixties, a nostalgia like an insatiable hunger. Out on the streets, these were some of the ugliest times in American history, racism made naked for the whole country, indeed the whole world, to see. In the courts and the White House, these were some of the noblest moments. The President... speaking to the nation, talked about the centuries of harm white Americans had committed against black Americans."

Returning to that time, her aim was to view it in the context of what happened to Chicago, and America, in the intervening 40 years. There have been gains yet there is still much to be fought for, she says, with the stridency of a diehard campaigner. There's the Republican hate machine that has left Obama's adminstration limping ("The opposition to him has a very racist edge"), her city's infamous corruption ("29 aldermen are in prison, three recent governors are also there") an iniquitious health care system ("free health care ought to be a slam dunk") and Chicago's enduring cultural segregation, with the black community forming a dangerously impoverished enclave in the South Side.

This latter issue appears to rankle most. "I have African American friends in the city who have experienced racism...The teenage son of John Hope Franklin [an eminent scholar of African American history]who lives near me was questioned by the police. What was a black teenager doing in a white neighbourhood?" She tells another story of a black friend who moved from the South Side to a mixed neighbourhood but "moved back to the South Side because she felt like a giraffe in a zoo."

This trope is one she has employed to describe herself and her intellectual Jewish family, living in the midst of screaming white Republicanism in Kansas. In the city of Lawrence, her father, a microbiologist and native New Yorker, found a job at the university. The most desirable residential areas in Kansas were still barred to African Americans and Jews while Paretsky was growing up. Reflecting on her outsider status in this all-white stronghold, in which her family could never have been white enough, she has written that "We were like giraffes, an oddity that inspired staring."

It is a world she describes vividly in the partly autobiographical novel Bleeding Kansas, which also, painfully, recalls her parents' unravelling relationship and her father's drinking. She bills her former self as something of a dumpy, overlooked teenager, wholly unrecognisable from the pin-thin, stylishly dressed 62-year-old today. The outside, she says, drawing attention to the soft velvet fabrics, pretty neckerchief and hues of green and gold, is meant to be deceptively, perhaps even disarmingly "feminine". "People point out that Warshawski's edgier than almost any other woman in fiction, and I think I'm edgier than most other women. I dress in this soft kind of way, I come in wearing soft colours with my Victorian face... and then I deck them."

There is comedy in this statement, but anger too. As an ardent, self-proclaimed second-wave feminist, much of this outrage is ideological, though one cannot but wonder how much stems from what appears to have been a debilitatingly male-dominated upbringing. Her parents paid for all four of her brothers' education but not their only daughter's schooling; she was expected to be the care-giver, and she remembers her father wearing a badge calling for the repeal of the 19th ammendment, which gave suffrage to American women in 1920.

Yet she says the anger that galvanised her writing in the 1980s came not from personal history but from her disgust at the sexist clichés within the American noir tradition, almost always featuring laconic men with a hardwired distrust of the pouting vamps they meet.

She had read crime fiction since her teenage years and "one of the things that began to trouble me was that the women... especially in American noir were either victims or vamps. The sexually active ones were evil, and the sexually chaste ones good but incapable."

She wrote an angry riposte to this tradition, and the result was Indemnity Only, which readers around the world welcomed – in spite of being told by New York publishers that the PI novel was long dead, and especially one that based itself in the "flyover" city of Chicago. "It was something I was doing from anger at the way women were presented in fiction, and not just crime fiction. I thought if I ever write a novel, I want to turn the tables on that tradition."

Turn the tables she did, so well in fact, that she has redefined the genre, with what detective novelist Val McDermid calls the "transgressive" central character who is "discounted by society". She won the Crime Writers Association's Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in 2006.

So 13 Warshawski novels later, is Paretsky still angry? Apparently so. "When I look at the younger generation of women especially in the United States and their reproduction rights, with not enough access to abortion, then I think 'why is it up to me to keep fighting this battle?' I have been doing this since the 1970s. It's time for the younger generation to step up. " There is a pause, and a moment when she contemplates her increasing mellowness with age: the fear that Warshawski may have lost some of her edge over the years. But in the next breath, she is back on the warpath.

"I went to Nashville, Tennessee, not long ago, and I saw Jesus billboards everywhere alongside billboards for Hooters Clubs (a franchise which trades on its waitresses' breasts) and it seemed to be a place about the sin of abortion and Hooters. It makes me furious and baffled at the same time."

So furious in fact, that the experience gave grist to her mill. Her next novel, already written and part of the Warshawski series, focuses on the female body. "It's going to be a kind of Pride and Prejudice with nudity." Tennessee, and Hooters, may be in for a bumpy ride.

Sara Paretsky and her book Hardball

From Huntington News --

Review: Sara Paretsy at St Peter's Church --

Review by Rosemary Westwell --
22 February 2010 --

An evening with Sara Paretsy at St. Peter's Church Ely on Saturday, February 20.

On TV, on the radio and moving from Topping's charming bookstore in the High Street Ely to a larger venue - what is so special about Sara Paretsky that makes her so popular? There are SO many crime writers out there, why should she be any different?



It was not until I heard her speak at St Peter's Church in Ely that it became obvious. Her wit, delight in irony and above all, her determination to root out and air the evils of her city Chicago, transfix your attention. You are left with a sense of admiration and awe. This woman is a formidable force and her writing compelling and instructive.

Her latest book, Hardball, pulls no punches. The political corruption that Chicago boasts and past injustices that lie unpunished are presented directly in her story as her intrepid heroine, private investigator V I Warshawski , battles to find out the truth about a missing person. Prejudice, police torture and an intransigently corrupt society provide an almost impenetrable force for VI to overcome. You are compelled to empathize with her sense of injustice.

When Sara worked voluntarily in Chicago in the summer of 1966 the city was one of the most segregated cities in America. African Americans were not permitted to rent or own houses in certain districts; they were banned from beaches and from certain jobs. Martin Luther King was asked to come and join the campaign for equality bringing with him the media that offered a certain amount of protection for the protesters. Sara described how few people understand how violent it had been at that time. She had felt an urgent need to tell the story. This urgent need to explore depths of the corruption that few would dare touch makes her stand out as an inspirational person and stimulating author.

As a Jew she visited Germany and noticed the humility and shame felt by many of the Germans she met. Yet, in America, she senses little of this guilt about injustices of the past. It is no wonder her husband calls her a pit bull ready to take on anyone as long as they are four times her size. Sara is indeed an indomitable force as a writer and campaigner for social morality. There are good reasons why her books published in over 30 countries are among the top best sellers.

Sara Paretsky’s Hardball, a Review

From The Financial Times --

Hardball --

Review by Christopher Fowler --
February 22 2010 --

Hardball
By Sara Paretsky

Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski is a Chicago private detective bedeviled by fluctuating family loyalties, old enemies, new allies and inconvenient neighbours. In Paretsky’s 13th Warshawski novel, Vic’s chaotic world is developing ever-deepening layers. She agrees to locate a gang member who vanished 40 years earlier on the eve of a legendary blizzard. He had been hired to help protect Martin Luther King when riots erupted over Dr King’s attempts to desegregate city housing. As the political ramifications involve her own family history, Warshawski finds that Petra, her young cousin newly arrived to aid a political campaign, has possibly been abducted.

This second plot strand allows Warshawsky to reveal her more human side, as the wealthy new-gen fem Petra encourages Vic to justify her old-school feminism. Within a racial melting pot, Paretsky hits her own personal best; Hardball takes the thinking woman’s detective to a new level of excellence.

Interview with Sara Paretsky

From Scarborough Evening News --

Pioneer in world of crime writing --

By Martin Herron --
19 February 2010 --

ONE of the world's top crime writers will walk Scarborough's mean streets on Sunday.

These days crime fiction by women dominates the bestseller charts, with novels by the likes of Patricia Cornwall and Minette Walters, selling in their millions.

But when Sara Paretsky created her character VI Warshawski in the early 80s there were very few female private eyes following in the footsteps of Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade and Lew Archer.

"Marcia Muller had written a couple of books at that time, but really VI was the first female character to take up a space that, until then, had been totally taken by men," Sara told the Evening News.

"And I wanted her to compete with them directly, on her own terms. That's why I made sure she came from a part of Chicago where girls grow up pretty quickly and pretty tough! I didn't want her to be a fantasy character like Modesty Blaise with all those slick karate moves. I wanted her to be a street fighter – and I sort of constructed her whole character around that."

Paretsky's latest book, Hardball, is the 13th novel to feature Warshawski – played on the big screen by Kathleen Turner in a frankly disappointing movie – and her creator says it can be a struggle to keep such a long-running series fresh.

"It can be difficult to come up with new ideas, though I think VI's managed to evolve quite realistically over the past 25 years. But it's not just a problem with VI – it's with the crime novel as a whole, which can be quite formulaic.

"It's important to keep up the momentum with action and physical engagement but, at the same time, you don't want to take that too far. I'm not a huge fan of the psychological crime novel where everything's internalised. As a reader there's just not enough going on there for me and I think a lot of other readers feel the same."

Hardball is a very personal work, taking a trip back in time to Chicago in the 60s, when Paretsky first arrived in Chicago, the city she is synonymous with. It follows old skeletons from the city's racially charged history, as well as haunting family secrets through four decades to the present.

"It's not just personal – you could even say it's self indulgent!" she said. "I arrived in Chicago in '66 and I was researching that time for a memoir and the more research I did, the more I realised how important that time of my life was.

"It was a very turbulent and very exciting time and it was when I came of age. I was doing community work there and we were involved in every aspect of the city from the very top right down to the streets, and the city and its story just became part of who I was.

“I guess if I’d gone to Paris at that age the same thing would have happened there.”

Both Chicago and Paris suffered rioting in 1968 – stateside in August at that year’s Democratic convention, and in France during May when protests by students and trade unionist came close to bring down the government.

“Oh that wouldn’t have bothered me, wherever I go riots follow!” said Sara.

Review of Hardball by Sara Paretsky

From Scotsman News --

Book review: Hardball --

Review by MARILYN STASIO --
21 February 2010 --

HARDBALL
By SARA PARETSKY
Hodder & Stoughton, 464pp, £12.99

THE thing about Sara Paretsky is, she's tough – not because she observes the bone-breaker conventions of the private-eye genre but because she doesn't flinch from examining old social injustices others might find too shameful (and too painful) to dig up.

In the dozen novels she's written about VI Warshawski, her stout-hearted but short-tempered Chicago private eye, Paretsky has questioned the memories of Holocaust victims, reopened wounds from the McCarthy era and repeatedly attacked the local political machine for its flagrant corruption.

Paretsky is in full Furies mode in Hardball, which reaches back to the tumultuous summer of 1966, when Martin Luther King led civil rights marches in Chicago and was met by race riots that cut through families and across generations, even spilling over into the churches. Warshawski, who was only ten at the time, assumes the burden of other people's memories when she agrees to help an old woman who hasn't seen her son since he disappeared during the January blizzard of 1967.

The son, Lamont Gadsden, was in a black street gang whose members saw the light and became Dr King's personal bodyguards, and he was at his side in Marquette Park when rioters killed one of King's followers. So the very white and very female private eye looking into the youth's disappearance finds herself ignored, insulted or attacked by every bent cop, crooked pol and angry political activist who'd like to keep his own shabby sins buried in the past.

Unlike many popular crime writers, Paretsky doesn't turn out books like some battery hen (the previous novel in this series was published in 2005), so it's a distinct pleasure to hear her unapologetically strident voice once again.

Her themes here may be familiar – Chicago's legacy of police brutality and political corruption is a never-ending source of material – but she gives them a personal spin by drawing on her own experiences as a community organiser during the summer of 1966 and sharing them with a large cast of voluble and opinionated characters, whose memories are as raw as her own.

There's a real sting both to the anger of a black man who took care of a friend beaten to insensibility by racist cops and to the grief of an elderly white woman who has been displaced from her family home. Voices like these can ring in your ears for – oh, 40 years and more.

(Sara Paretsky) This week: Temperance Brennan and V.I. Warshawski are back

From The Globe and Mail (Toronto) --

This week: Temperance Brennan and V.I. Warshawski are back --

By Margaret Cannon --
Sep. 18, 2009 --

HARDBALL
By Sara Paretsky, Putnam, 464 pages, $33.50

Sara Paretsky's detective, V.I. Warshawski, has had some completely impenetrable storylines to follow. But Hardball isn't one of those. Fixing her sights firmly on the civil liberties that the Bush administration snatched away from Americans in the name of “the war on terror,” Paretsky is on a roll.

It all begins as Vic takes on a pro bono case. The chaplain for a local home for the aged has asked her to find out whatever became of a man named Lamont Gadsden. He has been gone for more than 40 years, but his aunt, a woman of great faith, has never given up hope that he'd be found.

Now she's dying, and all she wants is to find out what became of her beloved nephew before she dies. There's no money and not much in the way of thanks, but she's going to give the old, cold case a good try. How this small tragedy leads Vic to conspiracy, abuse of power, murder and her own near-death is what Hardball is all about.

I love Warshawski and respect Paretsky, but I must say this book has a major flaw. That's the irritating and totally unbelievable young woman Paretsky uses to focus the plot. Petra Warshawski, Vic's twentysomething niece from St. Louis, is dim and ditzy. Nothing from her lingo to her motives works. When she disappeared, I hoped she'd turn up dead, but no such luck. It's great to have V.I. back, but Petra should take a hike.