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Résumé
Résumé
When VI Warshawski returns to her Chicago office, she finds her once tidy work space in ruins. Ripped documents, upended drawers, and framed pictures have been strewn about. The most chilling find, though, is a bracelet belonging to Warshawki's cousin, Petra. With Petra missing, the cops spring into action, labeling the episode as kidnapping, assault, and aggravated burglary. As they investigate, Warshawski wonders if her connection to the Anacondas has put her loved ones in danger.
Résumé
Chicago's unique brand of ball is sixteen-inch slow pitch, played in leagues all over the city for more than a century. But in politics, in business, and in law enforcement, the game is hardball. When V. I. Warshawski is asked to find Lamont Gadsden, a man who's been missing for four decades, a search that she figured would be futile turns lethal. Old skeletons from the city's racially charged history, as well as haunting family secrets -- her own and those of the elderly sisters who hired her -- rise up to brush her back from the plate with a vengeance. To complicate matters, Petra, a young cousin whom V.I. has never met, arrives from Kansas City to work on a political campaign. It does not take long for the high-spirited yet likable Petra to win over V.I.'s affections. When Petra goes missing after a break-in at the office, V.I. is determined to find her beloved cousin. As the search to locate Petra becomes more desperate, V.I. is also having difficulties tracking down Lamont Gadsden. Unable to catch a break, she learns that a nun who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., has died before she can reveal crucial evidence. V.I. herself almost dies in a blazing fire, and new information has emerged about her father's role in a politically and racially charged trial almost forty years ago. Afraid to discover that her adored father might have been a bent cop, V.I. takes the investigation all the way to its frightening end.
Critiques (5)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
Bestseller Paretsky tracks the poisonous residue of racial hatred that still seeps into Chicago life and politics in her fine 13th novel to feature gutsy PI V.I. "Vic" Warshawski, last seen in 2005's Fire Sale. In her search for a black man who disappeared in 1967, Lamont Gadsden, Vic reconnects with some of her father Tony's old police colleagues; pays a prison visit to Johnny Merton, a notorious gang leader she once defended in her lawyering days; and tracks down Steve Sawyer, who disappeared following a murder conviction. Vic confronts an ugly period in Chicago's history, a peaceful march in 1966 by Martin Luther King that resulted in a white riot and the murder of a young black woman, Harmony Newsome. Digging into this ancient history stirs passions and fears of what secrets might be revealed. The apparent kidnapping of Vic's fresh-out-of-college cousin, Petra, who's come to Chicago to work on a senatorial campaign, raises the ante. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Critique de Booklist
*Starred Review* A snippet from Paretsky's own life informs her fifteenth V. I. Warshawski crime story, which harks back to the riots during Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 visit to Chicago; at that time, Paretsky was working in Chicago as a community organizer. As usual in the series, the city, especially its working-class neighborhoods, is vividly characterized, as are its politics and ethnic and cultural conflicts. V. I. is at her most vulnerable here. Though ever the champion of the disenfranchised and the poor, and still pretty fast on her feet, the sometimes-reckless private investigator now sees 50 on the horizon. Having parted from yet another lover, she has begun to wonder if her stubborn devotion to work, which often wreaks havoc with those she cares about most, makes her unable to sustain a long-term relationship. The disappearance of her lively, twentysomething cousin, who was in Chicago to work on the campaign of an up-and-coming politician, adds to her nagging self-doubt. Surely savvy V. I. should have been able to keep the girl safe. Her angst-ridden determination to put things right eventually leads her back to the sixties and to a shocking secret about her family's history. Nuanced, well-realized characters and an intricately braided plot mark another stellar performance from a storyteller as dedicated to entertainment as to exposing humankind's treachery and greed.--Zvirin, Stephanie Copyright 2009 Booklist
Critique du New York Review of Books
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 V.I. Warshawski, her stouthearted but short-tempered Chicago P.I., Paretsky has questioned the memories of Holocaust victims, reopened wounds from the McCarthy era and repeatedly wailed on the local political machine for its flagrant corruption. Paretsky is in full Furies mode in HARDBALL (Putnam, $26.95), which reaches back to the tumultuous summer of 1966, when Martin Luther King led civil rights marches through the Southwest Side and was met by race riots that cut through families and across generations, even spilling over into the churches. Warshawski, who was only 10 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. While her themes here are familiar - Chicago's legacy of police brutality and political corruption is a never-ending source of material - she gives them a personal spin by drawing on her own experiences as a community organizer 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 to both the anger of a black man who took care of a friend beaten to insensibility by racist cops and the grief of an old white woman displaced from her family home. Voices like these can ring in your ears for - oh, 40 years and more. Writers can be so cruel. Without any warning, they cavalierly kill off their series sleuths (Colin Dexter), consign them to early retirement (Rennie Airth), send them off on extended foreign assignments (Barbara Cleverly) or, in the case of Peter Lovesey, simply dump them. Beginning in 1970 with "Wobble to Death," Lovesey wrote eight rough-and-tumble Victorian mysteries featuring Sergeant Cribb, a bare-knuckled police officer who went in for the extreme (not to say barbaric) sports of his day and was as familiar with London's seedy haunts as any criminal. Eight years later, the series was kaput, leaving fans with fond memories that can yet be fanned, now that Soho Press is bringing out handsome paperback editions of the novels, with great cover art by the likes of Thomas Nast and Gustave Doré. Meanwhile, the most durable of Lovesey's other detectives, Inspector Peter Diamond of the Bath C.I.D., has his 10th outing in SKELETON HILL (Soho, $24). The story opens with a modern-day re-enactment of a battle fought in Bath in 1643 and works itself up into one of Lovesey's familiar convoluted plots, layered with historical lore and teeming with comic characters up to their necks in no good. Diamond is a classic - better catch him while you can. With its sad story about lost boys and its mournful theme of the indifference of the living to those who walk out of their lives, ARCTIC CHILL (Minotaur, $24.99) may well be the most thoroughly depressing of all the gloomy police procedurals coming out of those cold lands near the Arctic Circle. But since the storyteller is Arnaldur Indridason, this Icelandic tale is delivered with exquisite sensitivity, in a moody translation by Bernard Scudder and Victoria Cribb. The murder of a 10-year-old schoolboy and the disappearance of his teenage brother alert Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson to the racial prejudice in Reykjavik against its growing population of Asian immigrants. "You run into closed doors everywhere," he observes during the investigation, which leads him to grave thoughts about his island nation and the insularity that once protected it - but now threatens to isolate it - from the world beyond its shores. There's always a log fire burning and it's always story time in the charming mysteries Louise Penny sets in sleepy Three Pines, a quaint Québécois clone of Brigadoon. While constant readers may think they know all there is to know about its eccentric villagers, Penny is a great one for springing surprises. In THE BRUTAL TELLING (Minotaur, $24.99), the dear chap who owns Olivier's Bistro is revealed to have a cutthroat business streak that may have something to do with the old hermit who's found dead one morning on the bistro floor. As with any village mystery series, attrition is a constant problem. Happily, Penny replenishes the population by introducing new characters, including the very promising Gilbert family, who have bought the old Hadley house and plan to turn it into a luxury inn and spa. There may be bad blood between the Gilberts and Olivier, but that only adds to the social chemistry that's always on the bubble in Three Pines.
Critique de Kirkus
V.I. Warshawski's 13th case (Fire Sale, 2005, etc.) drags her back to Chicago's tumultuous summer of 1966. Pastor Karen Lennon, chaplain to Lionsgate Manor nursing home, wants V.I. to help elderly Ella Gadsden and her ailing sister Claudia Ardenne with a little pro bono work. The assignmenttrack down Ella's missing son Lamontwould be simple, if the boy hadn't vanished more than 40 years ago, and if Chicago's finest had shown the slightest interest in his disappearance. As V.I. is settling into this cold, cold case, life goes on happening in the present. She breaks up with her most recent lover. Her cousin Petra, a bright-eyed college grad from Kansas City, pops up, lands a job working on charismatic Brian Krumas's senatorial campaign and showers V.I. with questions about their family. Lamont's surviving friends stonewall and revile V.I., even if they're in jail. Yet the draw of the past is paramount. A nun who shared murdered civil-rights activist Harmony Newsome's last moments at a Martin Luther Kingled march in 1966 is murdered under V.I.'s nose. Evidence links her beloved cop father to a cover-up of police torture. And Petra disappears hours after she enters V.I.'s home with a mysterious pair who turn it upside down looking for somethinga plot twist Paretsky begins with and then spends 270 pages working back up to. A tormented, many-layered tale that seems to have been dug out of Chicago history with a pickax. Readers who persevere through that interminable first-half flashback will be rewarded with the tremendous momentum of the second half. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique du Library Journal
Fans of Chicago sleuth V.I. Warshawski will cheer her return (after Fire Sale) as she handles a case steeped in local politics and civil unrest. V.I. accepts a cold missing-persons case and immediately begins to unearth memories that might better stay buried deep in the past. Her own family is brought up in this investigation: her father was the arresting officer on a related case; her young cousin Petra (in town working for a rising-star politician with family ties to V.I.'s uncle) takes a sudden interest in Warshawski family history and Vic's life; and V.I. has to balance her solitary bristle with a desire for connection with the past. Verdict Packed with Chicago history and racial and personal conflict, this story picks up quickly and is a finely honed mystery with serious depth. Expect high demand from series fans. This will also appeal to any local-crime or social- issue mystery readers. Race riots, police brutality, political bribery, Chicago's dirty history-this one has it all. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/09.]-Julie Kane, Sweet Briar Coll. Lib., VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
