Sara Paretsky
2) Fallout
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Description
V.I. Warshawski's impossible god-daughter Bernie convinces her to look for August, a young film-maker who has disappeared. The evidence indicates that he has gone to Kansas in the company of Emerald, an older black movie actress who wants to film the story of her life. Her search takes V.I. from the military base Emerald was born on, to the farm where she grew up outside a university town, ploughing up past and present-day secrets as she goes. What...
3) Overboard
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"On her way home from an all-night surveillance job, V.I. Warshawski is led by her dogs on a mad chase that ends when they discover a badly injured teen hiding in the rocks along Lake Michigan. The girl only regains consciousness long enough to utter one enigmatic word. V.I. helps bring her to a hospital, but not long after, she vanishes before anyone can discover her identity. As V.I. attempts to find her, the detective uncovers an ugly consortium...
4) Hard time
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PI V. I. Warshawski of Chicago experiences the harrowing world of women's prisons when she is incarcerated after being falsely arrested. It happens while she is probing the murder of an illegal immigrant.
5) Brush back
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In high school, V.I. thought she was in love with Frank Guzzo. He broke up with her, she went off to college, he started driving trucks for Bagby Haulage. She forgot about him until the day his mother, Stella, was convicted of bludgeoning his kid sister to death.
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"Stubbornness has landed private eye V.I. Warshawski in big trouble at her Chicago office. With her grand old Loop building set to be razed, she's become a hold-out tenant amid frayed wiring and scary, empty corridors. Then she finds a homeless woman with three kids in the basement, and before she can rescue them, they disappear. Worst of all, she's been implicated in a murder -- after the body of Deirdre Messenger, a prominent lawyer's wife, turns...
7) Shell game
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"Sara Paretsky follows her instant New York Times bestseller Fallout--her most widely read novel in years--with an extraordinary adventure that pits her acclaimed detective, V.I. Warshawski, against some of today's most powerful figures. Legendary sleuth V.I. Warshawski returns to the Windy City to save an old friend's nephew from a murder arrest. The case involves a stolen artifact that could implicate a shadowy network of international criminals....
8) Dead land
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Pub. Date
[2020]
Description
"Chicago may be the city of broad shoulders, but its political law is "Pay to Play." Money changes hands in the middle of the night, and by morning, buildings and parks are replaced by billion-dollar projects. Chicago PI V.I. Warshawski gets pulled into one of these clandestine deals through her impetuous goddaughter, Bernie Fouchard. Bernie tries to rescue Lydia Zamir, a famed singer-songwriter now living on the streets; Zamir's life fell apart...
9) Blacklist
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V.I. accepts a request from an old client to check up on an empty family mansion; subsequently surprises an intruder in the dark; and, giving chase, topples into a pond. Grasping for something to hold on to, her fingers close around a lifeless human hand. It is the body of a reporter who had been investigating events of forty-five years earlier, during the McCarthy era, and V.I.'s discovery quickly sucks her into the history of two great Chicago families-their...
10) Fire sale
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Description
When V.I. Warshawski becomes the girls' basketball coach at her old high school, she quickly learns that the job involves more than fast breaks and foul-shooting practice. Befriending the working mother of one of her players, she learns about a pattern of sabotage at small South Side factory. The allegations become personal when the plant explodes and V.I. is injured. Her suspicions lead her to the Bysen family, the fractious owners of the giant discount...
11) Body work
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An audience-participation performance by a controversial artist is disrupted by a violent outburst culminating in the artist's murder days later, prompting V.I. Warshawski to prove the innocence of an Iraqi war veteran charged with the crime.
12) Hardball
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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 a man who's been missing for four decades, a search that she figured would be futile becomes lethal when secrets from the city's racially charged history rise up to brush her back from the plate with a vengeance.
13) Pay dirt
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"V.I. Warshawski is famous for her cool under fire, her intelligence, her humor, her unflinching courage, and her love of good coffee. But even the strongest people sometimes need a break to recharge, so her friends send her to Kansas for a weekend of college basketball where Angela, one of her proťǧes, is playing. And that's where trouble finds V.I. Sabrina, one of Angela's roommates, disappears and V.I. agrees to try to find her. Finding a missing...
14) Breakdown
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Carmilla, Queen of the Night, is a shape-shifting raven whose fictional exploits thrill tween girls all over the world. When Chicago's Carmilla Club holds an initiation ritual in an abandoned cemetery, they stumble on an actual corpse, murdered vampire-style. The girls include daughters of some of Chicago's most powerful families. And for V.I. Warshawski, the questions multiply faster than the answers.
15) Critical mass
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Series
Description
"New York Times-bestselling author Sara Paretsky's brilliant protagonist V.I. Warshawski returns in another hard-hitting entry, combining razor-sharp plotting and compelling characters with a heady mix of timely political and social themes. V.I. Warshawski's closest friend in Chicago is the Viennese-born doctor Lotty Herschel, who lost most of her family in the Holocaust. Lotty escaped to London in 1939 on the Kindertransport with a childhood playmate,...
17) Windy City blues
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Nine stories on PI V.I. Warshawski of Chicago, mostly involving friends and family. In one, at the request of an Italian cousin she searches for sheet music which belonged to her mother, in another a friend asks her aid in recovering a stolen family sculpture.
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"Meeting an anonymous client late on a sizzling summer night is asking for trouble. But trouble is Chicago private eye V.I. Warshawski's specialty. Her client says he's the prominent banker, John Thayer. Turns out he's not. He says his son's girlfriend, Anita Hill, is missing. Turns out that's not her real name. V.I.'s search turns up someone soon enough-the real John Thayer's son, and he's dead. Who's V.I.'s client? Why has she been set up and sent...
19) Burn marks
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"Victoria, sweetie, you look terrific!" With those words - and the sour yeasty smell of stale beer - Elena, V.I. Warshawski's derelict aunt, re-enters her niece's life at three in the morning. Burned out of her SRO hotel, Elena has turned to V.I. for a place to stay. V.I. vows that it will be a short visit and uses some old political contacts to find Elena a room. When V.I. is hired to investigate the fire at the hotel, her aunt disappears, and her...
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When Chicago Black Hawks hockey legend Boom Boom Warshawski slips off a wharf and drowns in Lake Michigan, cousin V.I. questions the report of accidental death and rumors of suicide. V.I.'s search leads to the center of Chicago's shipping industry, where she risks her own life to discover her cousin's killer.