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Breakdown
Sara Paretsky's new bestseller and the fifteenth in the series pits V.I. Warshawski against a right-wing political pundit with powerful connections in a riveting novel that combines contemporary issues and suspense in Paretsky's unique way.
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Deadlocks
Boom Boom's body was found floating near the docks, chewed up and spat out by a ship's propeller. Friends since childhood, Vic and Boom Boom had a pact, they looked out for each other. Now a private eye, Vic wants to know exactly how Boom Boom died.
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Fire Sale
A favour to an old friend means a return to the streets of South Chicago for V.I. Warshawski.....But the neighbourhood where she grew up is now a dangerous, depressed place that reeks of bad memories. And the high school basketball team she has come to coach is a group of gang-bangers, fundamentalists and teenage moms....The mother of one of the girls asks V.I. to look into claims of sabotage at the flag-making factory where she works. If it closes, the only other employer is By-Smart, a behemoth superstore that discounts its wages as heavily as its wares. But V.I. has barely agreed to help when the factory blows up...As V.I. invetsigates, she finds herself confronting the powerful family who own By-Smart. Founder William 'Buffalo Bill' Bysen is a difficult old man, at odds with both V.I. and his sons. And when his favoured grandson, Billy, runs away with one of her basketball players, V.I. is squeezed between the needs of two very different families in her attempts to find the errant teenagers and track down a particularly cruel murderer...."
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Tunnel Vision
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 up sprawled across her desk. V.I., who had volunteered with Deirdre at a women's shelter, suspects her death is linked to a case of upper-class domestic abuse so slickly concealed that the police refuse to believe it. Increasingly at odds with the cops, V.I. is blindly plunging ahead after the truth. And her path may lead to corruption at the highest levels.or deep into the abandoned tunnels beneath Chicago's streets, where secrets are hiding in the dark like a child's--or V.I.'s--worst nightmare.
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A Woman's Eye
Crime is common ground for the twenty-one women writers in this extraordinary collection of contemporary mystery fiction. The voices here include professional crime solvers who take you from the mean streets of V.I. Warshawski's Chicago in a case of music and murder... to the California freeway where Kinsey Millhone's beloved VW skids into a shooting... to the gang-held turf of Sharon says mum's the word. And then there are mothers, grandmothers, battered wives, and social workers -- ordinary women in extraordinary situations whose voices reveal contemporary life as seen through a woman's eye. From the opening tale of a girl down-and-out in London and what she steals from a corpse... to the final story of a summer vacation in the Berkshires, complete with romance and sudden death... this unique collection brings us great mystery writing that engages both our intellects and our hearts.
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Indemnity Only
Meeting an anonymous client late on a sizzling summer night is asking for trouble. But trouble is Chicago private eye V.I. Warshwski'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 out on a wild-goose chase? By the time she's got it figured, things are hotter -- and deadlier -- than Chicago in July. V.I.'s in a desperate race against time. At stake: a young woman's life.
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Women on The Case
Crime and detection are women's work for twenty-six great writersin this second brilliant collection of mystery fiction edited by Sara Paretsky. From wicked irony and white-collar crime, here arevoices known and unknown at home and abroad, as familiar crime turf in America and England is expanded to Russia, Algeria, Austria, Germany, and South America. From Ruth Rendell's lovelorn secretary to Eleanor Taylor Bland's Asian-African college professor, the women characters in these tales are girlfriends who collaborate to catch a thief...or get away with murder. In each case, a master storyteller has created a new, powerful fiction that plumbs the depth and breadth of a woman's art.
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Total Recall
For V.I., the journey begins with a national conference in downtown Chicago, where angry protesters are calling for the recovery of Holocaust assets. Replayed on the evening news is the scene of a slight man who has stood up at the conference to tell an astonishing story of a childhood shattered by the Holocaust — a story that has devastating consequences for V.I.’s cherished friend and mentor, Lotty Herschel. Lotty was a girl of nine when she emigrated from Austria to England, one of a group of children wrenched from their parents and saved from the Nazi terror just before the war broke out. Now stunningly — impossibly — it appears that someone from that long-lost past may have returned. With the help of a recovered-memory therapist, Paul Radbuka has recently learned his true identity. But is he who he claims to be? Or is he a cunning impostor who has usurped someone else’s history ... a history Lotty has tried to forget for over fifty years? As a frightened V.I. watches her friend unravel, she sets out to help in the only way she can: by investigating Radbuka’s past. Already working on a difficult case for a poor family cheated of their life insurance, she tries to balance Lotty’s needs with her client’s, only to find that both are spiraling into a whirlpool of international crime that stretches from Switzerland and Germany to Chicago’s South Side. As the atrocities of the past reach out to engulf the living, V.I. struggles to decide whose memories of a terrible war she can trust, and moves closer to a chilling realization of the truth — a truth that almost destroys her oldest friend.
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Bitter Medicine
Chicago private eye V.I. Warshawski knows from the start that Consuelo Alvarado's baby is trouble. Consuelo is sixteen. Diabetic. And the daughter of a friend. When she goes into labor too early, even V.I.'s wild drive to get her to the hospital can't save either Consuelo or her child. Soon V.I. is investigating possible malpractice at the emergency room—and falling for a doctor who works there. Mixing business and love is always bad medicine, but V.I. finds herself listening to her heart, not her head. And when a brutal murder and the violent destruction of a women's clinic put her at the center of a very dirty conspiracy, justice may be the only remedy for a hurt that cuts deep...and chills right to the bone....
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Windy City Blues
Decked out in her silk shirts and no-nonsense Attitude, V.I. is out to make a living--by the skin of her teeth. In "Grace Notes," V.I. has barely finished her morning coffee when she sees an ad in the paper asking for information about her own mother, long dead. The paper leads V.I. to her newfound Italian cousin Vico, who's looking for music composed by their great-grandmother. What's the score? Clearly it's something to kill for... "The Pietro Andromache" finds V.I.'s friend Dr. Lotty Herschel with motive and means to dispatch her professional rival and steal his priceless statue. Lotty didn't do it--but does she know who did? V.I. soon cuts to the art of the case--and it's not a pretty picture at all! Summoned by an old high school friend to a race "At the Old Swimming Hole," V.I. ends up swimming with the sharks
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Blood Shot
V.I. Warshawski isn't crazy about going back to her old south Chicago neighborhood, but a promise is something she always keeps. Caroline, a childhood friend, has a dying mother and a problem -- after twenty-five years she wants V.I. to find the father she never knew. But when V.I. starts probing into the past, she not only finds out where all the bodies are buried -- she stumbles onto a very new corpse. Now she's stirring up a deadly mix of big business and chemical corruption that may become a toxic shock to a snooper who knows too much.