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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 5, No. 6 |
 appraises the new V. I. Warshawski novel by Sara Paretsky |
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Buried secrets & a corpse
keep V.I. Warshawski busy
of TheColumnists.com
There's a handful of female American crime/mystery writers all mystery fans need to keep up with regularly: Sue Grafton, the hard-boiled queen who's busily working her way through the alphabet with her book titles about private eye Kinsey Millhone; Elizabeth George, whose Inspector Lyndley mysteries, set in England, are the best of all current "traditional" mysteries; Patricia Cornwell, who started the literary "forensic" boom with her Kay Scarpetta series--and Sara Paretsky, whose private eye V.I. Warshawski has done for Chicago what Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe did for L.A.
Paretsky may be the best of them all. At least, her V.I. Warshawski just keeps getting better and better.
Take the example of her latest book, out late last year, called "Blacklist." This is my idea of a classic hard-boiled detective mystery, but with a fresh and extremely contemporary angle. Would you believe her Chicago P.I. winds up helping a young man accused of being an Arab terrorist, then finds herself in the crosshairs of the Patriot Act?
All I can say is I hope nobody gave a copy of "Blacklist" to Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft for Christmas. If so, Paretsky may be vacationing at government expense at Guantanamo Bay some day soon.
In "Blacklist," which moves like a hurricane bearing down on the coast, V.I. is hired by a frequent client to find out what's behind those mysterious lights his 90something mother keeps seeing at Larchmont, the abandoned mansion next door to her place in the filthy rich Chicago suburbs. It seems the cops checked the house out, found nothing, then assumed the old lady was on loco weed or neck deep in hardened arteries.
But V.I. decides the old woman seems reasonbly cogent and has good reason to be somewhat ticked at the police attitude. When V.I. checks the place herself, she doesn't get inside because she stumbles and falls into the stagnant, gunk-filled swimming pool, where she discovers a floating corpse.
Back on dry land, V.I. learns the floater was a distinguished black journalist who works for a trendy Chicago-based national magazine that caters to urban African-Americans. Based on the preliminary medical examination, the cops believe the writer must have been despondent and drowned himself since there were no signs of foul play.
V.I. smells a rat--and is pretty sure she didn't pick one up while playing in the stagnant water with the corpse. She agrees to help the journalist's family find out what he was doing at this abandoned estate in the middle of the night in a neighborhood mainly reserved for old, wealthy white families.
Ultimately, that leads V.I. into tracing the story the journalist was looking into at the time of his death: A probing look into a scandal connected to the era of witch-hunting by Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Could he have uncovered a secret so important that somebody might have killed him to shut him up?
Paretsky has lots of fun with this mystery plot, wrapping it up in some very vintage secrets and dirty deeds, but also linking it to the nasty work of Ashcroft and his right-wing cronies in the Justice Department, who suspect the mysterious lights at the old Larchmont mansion may have been the work of a teenager from Egypt that they've tied into the Arab terrorists responsible for the 9/11 WTC towers attack.
Because V.I. Warshawski is poking around in the same case, the feds and local authorities begin to think she's concealing evidence--and may even be concealing the boy terrorist. Suddenly, she's being tailed and her home and office are being searched--without benefit of warrants or other courtesies usually paid to innocent-until-proven-guilty Americans.
This is a heavy load for V.I. to carry all by herself. (Her boy friend, Morrell the journalist, is overseas, presumably in Afghanistan.) During the course of this mystery, she gets battered up pretty well, shot at and nearly drowned. She's also being hounded by the law and occasionally finds herself with an irate client or two.
But V.I. Warshawski is one of the most resourceful--and enduring--of all American private eyes, so you can be sure she gets to the bottom of what strange and curious things are going on between the older and younger branches of some of Chicago's richest and arrogant families.
In short, "Blacklist"
is a worthy addition to your mystery library--and one of Paretsky's
most original thrillers.
©2004 by Ron Miller.
The Ron Miller caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The book
cover reproduction is ©2003 by Putnam.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
teaches classes in mystery and related topics at Whatcom Community
College and Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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