Description:

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Private eye V.I. Warshawski takes a break from tony Lakeview to fill in for her old high school basketball coach on Chicago's South Side in her 12th adventure. Vic starts her volunteer stint looking for a team sponsor at megadiscount store By-Smart, whose founder, Buffalo Bill Bysen, is a fellow alum. Of all Bysen's cutthroat, cost-cutting family, only idealist 19-year-old Billy shows any interest in helping the team. When he disappears, his frustrated father hires Vic to find him. The mother of a high school basketball player also hires Vic to investigate sabotage at the flag factory where she works—an investigation cut short when the factory blows up before Vic's eyes. Things go no better at school or at home, and clues pile on but they don't add up. Vic takes her lumps as she makes her way from a fundamentalist church, where the pastor goes to extremes for his flock, to the city dump, where villains try to bury their secrets. Paretsky has recently tackled the Holocaust (_Total Recall_) and globalization (_Hard Time_); here she explores the struggles of the working poor and the schemes of the rich and infamous. Packed with social themes and moral energy, held together by humor, compassion and sheer feistiness, this novel shows why Paretsky and her heroine are such enduring figures in American detective fiction.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From

Starred Review Long-running mystery series have a way of losing readers over time, but anyone who has drifted away from Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski should promptly return to the fold. The thirteenth Warshawski novel is one of the best, primarily because it takes V. I. back to her South Chicago roots, filling in fascinating backstory on the sleuth's evolution and effectively utilizing both the city's broad-shouldered past and its radically globalized present. V. I. returns to her old neighborhood--in the far southeast corner of Chicago--to fill in for her former high-school basketball coach, who is fighting cancer. Confronted by a dilapidated gym and a team made up mainly of gangbangers and single mothers, V. I. feels overwhelmed--for about five minutes, before she reacts with typical ferocity, driving her players and doggedly pursuing corporate funding for the team. It's the latter that takes her to By-Smart, South Chicago's main employer, run by a bigoted, born-again billionaire. Soon V. I. is caught in the middle of a Romeo and Juliet romance between the son of Mr. By-Smart and the daughter of a Latina single mother, whose employer's factory has just been destroyed by fire. Paretsky has never been better than she is here at evoking a sense of place--abandoned and rusting steel mills casting long shadows over the difficult lives of largely immigrant families. Nothing seems forced as Paretsky plays socioeconomic realities against a universal story of passion and jealousy, building the plot from the marshy ground up and allowing Chicago to muscle its way into a costarring role. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved