Indemnity Only

In this gripping adventure, the first V.I. Warshawski mystery, America’s top private eye is tossed into dangerous adventure when a seemingly straightforward assignment becomes complicated and deadly. Hired by a man who calls himself John Thayer, V.I.'s assignment is to find Thayer’s son Peter’s missing girlfriend. But when V.I. finds young Peter's dead body instead, her client disappears. Her efforts to track down her client and learn his true identity take her deep into a labyrinth of fraud and violence. By the time V.I. figures out the answers she is in a race to find the missing young woman - before the murderers do.

Deadlock

Deadlock, V.I. Warshawksi's second case, involves the huge Great Lakes shipping industry. Once again the subject is murder - this time the "accidental death" of Boom-Boom Warshawski, an ex-hockey star and V.I.’s beloved cousin, who fell - or was pushed - off a rain-slicked pier on Chicago’s busy waterfront. Convinced that Boom-Boom was in fact killed because of information he had uncovered about criminal doings on the shipping lines, V.I. begins a long and frustrating search for her cousin’s murderer. In the course of an investigation that takes her to a remote Canadian port city and a calamitous trip on a sabotaged freighter, V.I. finds all too many possible candidates for the killer, including a grain company executive involved in extortion; and rival heads of two shippers, one of whom is being blackmailed for his criminal past; a hockey player whose specialty is graft; and Boom-Boom’s lover, an icily beautiful dancer with expensive tastes in men and merchandise.

Killing Orders

Killing Orders, V.I. Warshawski's third adventure, starts when her great-aunt Rosa summons the detective to her cold suburban home. Rosa made V.I.'s childhood miserable and the detective resents the command to help her aunt prove she didn't embezzle five million dollars from a local Dominican priory. All hell breaks loose when a mysterious opponent tries to take Vic off the case by throwing acid in her eyes and burning down her apartment. And when a friend who’s involved in the case is brutally murdered, it begins to look as if Vic hasn’t got a prayer. But Warshawski continues to follow every lead, even when they point to some pretty unorthodox conclusions: Perhaps the Dominicans are covering up a financial scandal. Maybe the whole conspiracy is under the patronage of an international conglomerate, or of Don Pasquale, king of the Chicago mob. Worst of all, someone who’s close to Vic could be involved - her darkly handsome English lover, Roger Ferrant, or even Aunt Rosa herself.

Bitter Medicine

Bitter Medicine, V.I.'s fourth case, starts when a young friend goes into premature labor. V.I. and Consuelo are far from home. By the time Consuelo's doctor, young Malcolm Tregiere, arrives, both she and her baby are dead at the local for profit hospital. V.I. assumes this is a tragic but unavoidable outcome. However, when Dr. Tregiere is brutally murdered and V.I. begins to investigate, her work unleashes a trail of violence that leads her back to the hospital where Consuelo died. The trail of greed and violence the detective uncovers proves to be bitter medicine indeed.

Blood Shot

In her fifth V.I. novel, Sara Paretsky brings the private investigator back to her old neighborhood and to the past she cannot escape. Blood Shot begins innocently enough when V.I. attends the reunion of her championship basketball team and Caroline, a childhood friend who organized the event, asks V.I. a professional favor: "Find my father for me". Caroline’s mother is dying, and Caroline wants to meet the father she has never known. The search for him not only calls up memories of V.I.’s own childhood but quickly mushrooms into something darker. After V.I. starts to probe, the body of another old friend turns up in the appropriately named Dead Stick Pond. Who would want Nancy Cleghorn dead? The list of suspects includes everyone from a powerful alderman to the chairman of a great chemical conglomerate. And what is the connection between Nancy’s death and the search for Caroline’s father? Moving across Chicago from its decaying industrial districts to its posh Gold Coast, V.I. uncovers a network of corruption. The deeper V.I. digs, the murkier things get, until she finds herself at the mercy of malevolent forces completely beyond her control.

Burn Marks

"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 aunt’s young friend is found dead at a construction site. V.I. is warned off the case by both a high-ranking police officer and a major Chicago developer - who also happens to be a close friend of the chairman of the Cook County Board. After three terrifying attempts on her life, V.I. doesn’t know whether it’s the politicians, the police, or the developers who are after her. As this, her sixth investigation, takes her deep into the workings of both the construction business and Cook County politics, V.I. discovers a connection between the two that brings her to a confrontation where the line between friend and enemy is redrawn to frightening effect.

Guardian Angel

Racine Avenue is going upscale - bad news for hand-to-mouth residents like V.I. Warshawski. As tax bills skyrocket, newcomers pressure old inhabitants into fixing up their homes or moving out. To the yuppies on the block the worst eyesore belongs to old Hattie Frizell, whose yard is "returning to native prairie, complete with hubcaps". Their block club wants her and her five dogs gone. V.I. and Hattie have a relationship of sorts: one of those five dogs gave V.I.'s dog Peppy an unwelcome litter. When Hattie slips in her bath and is rushed unconscious to the hospital, V.I. feels compelled to get involved. But neighboring lawyer Todd Pichea and his wife, Chrissie, act swiftly to get the courts to make them Hattie's legal guardians. V.I. returns from a business trip to find they've put the old woman's dogs to sleep. Furious, V.I. starts poking around in the Pichea's affairs, hoping to turn up something scandalous enough to make them lose their guardianship. Hattie isn't the detective's only worry. When her downstairs neighbor's oldest friend disappears, Mr. Contreras persuades V.I. to investigate. As she probes both problems, V.I. uncovers a scandal linking one of Chicago's oldest industrial families to union fraud and a politically connected bank. Her investigation takes her into the depths of the steamy Sanitary Canal and brings her eyeball-to-eyeball with her ex-husband, Dick Yarborough. When her dear friend Lotty Herschel and her own lawyer turn against her, V.I. is left alone to struggle with the most serious case of her career.

Tunnel Vision

Her office building is falling down, the unpaid bills are mounting up. V.I. Warshawski needs a lucrative case and needs it fast. Instead, her most important client demands that she find a community service job to keep his computer-hacking son out of jail. At the same time, V.I. is worried about a homeless family she found in the basement of her office building. Her search for emergency shelter sends her to Home Free, a charitable organization for the homeless headed by an old college flame. She's puzzled by Home Free's cold response, and even more troubled when they start giving the runaround to a group of tradeswomen she knows. Hard up for money, V.I. resists investigating Home Free until one of its board members is murdered in the detective's own office. The track she follows leads her to the trail of tormented runaways, abused spouses, and a cynical financial fraud that stretches from Chicago's banks to the halls of Congress. As she nears the dramatic climax of her punishing case, with her emotional and physical resources taxed to the limit, V.I. finds she must choose between her private happiness and her sense of justice...and learns that the hardest questions she must answer are the ones she asks herself.

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 abut 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 its not a pretty picture at all! In Strung Out love means nothing and V.I.'s quick to learn the score as her old friend's tennis-champion daughter is under suspicion for strangling her father with a racket string. And there's more, nine stories in all, in this masterful collection of short fiction starring V.I. Warshawski.

Hard Time

Multimedia conglomerate Global Entertainment has purchased the Chicago Herald-Star, forcing the paper's staff to scramble to stay employed. Reporter Murray Ryerson, V.I.'s longtime friend and sometime rival, manages to reinvent himself as the host of a television show on Global's network. On her way home from a party celebrating Murray's debut, V.I. almost runs over a woman lying in the street. Stopping to help, V.I. soon learns that her Good Samaritan act will drop her squarely in a boiling intrigue. In a case that forces her to go head-to-head with one of the world's largest providers of private security and prison services, a case that exposes dark hidden truths behind the razzle-dazzle of the entertainment industry, V.I. will be ahead of the game if she gets out alive.

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 friendunravel, 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.

Ghost Country

Harriet and Mara Stonds have been raised in luxury by their grandfather, famous neurosurgeon Abraham Stonds. Harriet is the apple of her grandfather's eye - tall, blond, successful at everything she does, always the good girl. Mara plays the role of ugly stepsister, at least to her grandfather, who has told her for years that she's lazy, stupid, and ungrateful. But things are about to change for the Stonds family. A drunken opera singer, a softhearted psychotherapist, a group of homeless women, and a mysterious visitor who performs miracles will each play a key role in opening the eyes of Harriet and Mara to a world they've never imagined.