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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 6, No. 33 |
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'FIRE SALE' |
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V.I. Warshawski returns
to her old neighborhood
of TheColumnists.com
For a time, it may be a ltitle jarring: Private eye V. I. Warshawski gets a new job coaching a girl's basketball team in Sara Paretsky's new mystery novel "Fire Sale" (Putnam, $25.95), then gets seriously injured when she's nearly blown up in an explosive factory fire.
But it's all just Paretsky's scheme to have us journey back with Warshawski as she returns to the heart of her old neighborhood on Chicago's South Side where old acquaintances--and an enemy or two--are waiting to complicate her investigation into a series of industrial sabotage events.
This taxing--and life-threatening--case is pretty dramatic proof that doing pro bono work often costs a private eye a lot more than just lost income.
If you should happen to be stepping into V.I.'s world with this new novel, you might reach the conclusion that she's a very unlucky and commercially unsuccessful lady. I don't recall her earning a dime on any of the 402 pages. Meanwhile, she gets knocked around a good deal for a lady and doesn't have anything remotely resembling a romantic moment with her more recent boy friend, Morrell, the adventurous journalist, who's laid up with injuries after returning to Chicago from the Afghanistan war zone.
Though my level of interest in high school girls' basketball may not even be measurable, I found lots to cheer about in "Fire Sale," especially Paretsky's unflattering portrait of a Walmart-like store chain and its right-wing owners, who turn out to be at the center of the "sabotage" events she begins to uncover in Chicago.
The head guy is an old tyrant she calls "Buffalo Bill"Bysen, founder of the By-Smart chain of stores. This is the sort of corporate Nazi who might put his own 80-year-old mom on the night shift, cleaning toilets, if he thought it might increase efficiency at the store. Let me see: Does he do that in "Fire Sale"? Gee, I don't remember. Bu, not to worry: He does lots of really nasty stuff like that.
Warshawski gets into this mess when she agrees to temporarily take over the coaching job for the girls' team when her old friend--and former coach--becomes too ill to carry on. Warshawski inherits a team of mostly Latino girls who come to the gym burdened with lots of woe associated with poverty. As a favor to team member Josie Dorrado, V.I. meets with the girl's mother, who fears she'll lose her job because of a series of sabotage events at the factory where she works. Reluctantly, V.I. begins looking into the situation, going against the advice of the Chicago police, who don't want a private gumshoe messing around in their business.
When Warshawski is badly injured in a blast at the factory, which manufactures items for the "By Smart" chain, she has her own motivation for getting to the bottom of the case. Her suspicions of a conspiracy are confirmed when she gets to know young "Billy the Kid" Bysen, grandson of the corporate kingpin, who has developed a social conscience while working in a junior executive role with the firm where his own father and all his relatives are employed.
Once young Bysen disappears with Josie Dorrado, V.I. is approached by the corrupt Bysen management and asked to find him ASAP. For Warshawski, that's like being hired by Hitler to defend the Third Reich at the start of World War II.
Another complication for the injured private eye is the arrival of Marcena, a glamorous journalist friend of Morrell's, who's presumably doing a story on Chicago's poverty-gripped South Side, but quickly begins to dog the same case Warshawski's working on and stirring up considerable trouble for everyone, including herself. It doesn't help that Marcena is also crashing at Morrell's apartment.
Sara Paretsky is one of America's very best mystery writers, possibly the queen of the female "hard-boiled" school, and I've never been disappointed with one of her novels. Though this isn't quite the equal of the sizzling "Blacklist," Paretsky's last Warshawski mystery, it's a darn good one that maintains the high quality of this great detective series.
©2005 by Ron Miller.
The book cover reproduction is courtesy of G.P. Putnam's Sons.
This column first posted Aug. 22, 2005
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
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine
and teaches classes in mystery for the Academy of Lifelong Learning
at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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