V.I. Warshawski Books

The first V.I. Warshawski novel! • “[V.I. Warshawski] is . . . wonderful company and a rich discovery awaiting those who have yet to meet her.”— Los Angeles Times 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.

“V.I. Warshawski is one of the best . . . smart, tough, sexy.”— Daily News (New York) “Sara Paretsky makes excellent use of local backgrounds in a carefully plotted tale of murder and great misdeeds in the world of Great Lakes cargo shipping.”— Chicago Tribune When Chicago Black Hawks hockey legend Boom Boom Warshawski slips off a wharf and drowns in Lake Michigan, his private-eye cousin questions the accidental death report and rumors of suicide. Armed with a bottle of Black Label and a Smith & Weson, V.I. follows a trail of violence and corruption to the center of the Windy City's powerful shipping industry. Dodging elaborate attempts on her life with characteristic grit and humor, the one-of-a-kind detective wends her way through a maze of grain elevators and thousand-ton freighters, ruthless businessmen and gorgeous ballerinas, to ferret out Boom Boom's killers before they phase her out of the picture—permanently. “Hard-boiled detective fiction . . . a swift-paced and engrossing read.”— The Philadelphia Inquirer “Slithers with suspense!”— Chicago Sun-Times

V.I.'s battleaxe Aunt Rosa is under investigation by the FBI and SEC after counterfeit stock certificates were found at St. Albert's Priory, where she serves as treasurer. As malicious as her aunt is, V.I. knows she's not dishonest, so V.I. vows to protect her from taking the fall. But V.I. starts questioning the strength of her family ties when a menacing voice on the phone threatens to throw acid into her eyes if she doesn't butt out. The stakes are high as she begins to sniff out a connection between Chicago's most powerful institutions: the Church and the Mob.

In this novel, Vic Warshawski, heroine of "Indemnity Only", "Deadlock" and "Killing Orders", investigates Chicago's private hospital system. Through her friend Lotty Herschel, a top obstetrician who runs a clinic in a poor neighbourhood, Vic takes an interest in Consuela, 16 years old and pregnant.

“No one, male or female, writes better P.I. books than Paretsky.”— The Denver Post 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  stumbles onto some long-buried secrets—and 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. “[Paretsky’s] work does more than turn the genre upside down: her books are beautifully paced and plotted, and the dialogue is fresh and smart.”— Newsweek “Her best and boldest work to date . . . a criminal investigation that is a genuine heroic quest.”— The New York Times Book Review

“The best of the Warshawski novels!”— Los Angeles Times Book Review Underneath V. I. Warshawski’s wisecracking P.I. exterior lies a real pushover. When elderly neighbor Mr. Contreras asks her to look into a fellow union retiree’s sudden disappearance, she says “yes” from her heart, not her head. And when a crotchety eighty-year-old dog owner starts wrangling with a Yuppie-Come-Lately couple on their blue-collar street, again, it’s V.I. to the rescue. Only it all goes to hell in a handbasket when Mr. Yuppie turns out to be a lawyer in V.I.’s ex-husband’s law firm, and the missing retiree turns up floating facedown in a canal. And now V.I.’s strapping on her shoulder holster to snoop into Chicago’s labor unions and politicos, because being on the side of the angels won’t win her any halos… but it’s the perfect place for an encounter with violent death. Praise for Guardian Angel “A fast-paced, complicated mystery… the real joy of Guardian Angel is Paretsky’s smooth pen and continuing cast of characters.” —New York Daily News “No one, male or female, writes better P.I. books than Paretsky, and Guardian Angel is the best to date!” — The Denver Post “One monster of a plot.” — Booklist “Some crime series grow stale over time, but there's no sign of fatigue here. This is partly because the recurring characters continue to develop and engage the reader, and partly because of the moral intelligence that informs the writing.” — Spectator

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “ The best of Sara Paretsky’s mystery novels . . . all of [Sara] Warshawski’s feminist and liberal proclivities are in full boil, propelling a complex and action-filled plot.” 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. “Riveting . . . a ripsnorting climax . . . [Warshawski is] street-smart, feisty yet appealingly vulnerable.”— Chicago Sun-Times

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “When it comes to creating character, evoking place, and writing crackling and convincing dialogue, Sara Paretsky has no peer—and Hard Time proves it once again.”— Chicago Tribune “Terrific . . . expertly plotted . . . This book [is] her best.”— The New York Times Book Review In an instant, the lives of two women collided. One was behind the wheel of a Trans Am she liked to drive too fast. The other was lying in the road, dying an agonizing death. When Chicago private eye V.I. Warshawski got out of her car to look at the woman she almost hit, she began a long, harrowing descent into a world of shadowy secrets and tangled lives—and into the darkest heart of her city. In Hard Time , which heralds the triumphant return of the much-loved heroine V.I. Warshawski, Sara Paretsky revisits the gritty urban landscape she illuminates with brilliant compassion and vivid color. For as V.I. unravels the mystery of a battered and discarded woman, she moves through circles of the rich and the troubled, into the bitter home of a powerful Chicago family, into the pampered world of a TV star, and behind the razor wire of a women’s prison. What V.I. finds is a web of conspiracy—and explosive secrets hidden in the darkest places of all. . . . ”You’ll feel handcuffed to this book until you’ve finished—probably at 3 a.m.”— The Denver Post

Following V.I. Warshawski on a road that travels back more than fifty years, this book is an intricate maze of wartime lies, secrets and retribution. For V.I., the journey begins with a conference in Chicago, where angry protesters are calling for the recovery of Holocaust assets...

From one of the most distinguished writers in American crime fiction - her most brilliant and daring novel yet. This is a story of secrets and betrayals that stretch across four generations-secrets political, social, sexual, all of them with the power to kill. Eager for something physical to do in the spirit-exhausting wake of 9/11, 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 fortunes intertwined by blood, sex, money, and the scandals that may or may not have resulted in murder all these years later. At the same time, she inadvertently becomes involved in the story of a missing Egyptian boy whose possible terrorist connections make him very much sought after by the government. As the two cases drive her forward-and then shockingly tumble together-she finds that wealth and privilege, too, bear a terrible price; and the past has no monopoly on patriotic scoundrels. Before everything is over, at least two more people will lie dead . . . and V.I. might even be one of them. A novel as passionate, complex, and powerfully entertaining as its acclaimed heroine, Blacklist is a stunning achievement.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Takes off with a bang—literally...V. I. remains a paragon among PIs, and Fire Sale is one of Paretsky’s best books yet.”— St. Louis Post-Dispatch A conscience can weigh a PI down more than the heaviest firearm—and get her into more trouble too. It’s that nagging conscience that makes V. I. Warshawski agree to fill in as coach for the girls’ basketball team at her South Chicago alma mater—which in turn leads her to the headquarters of By-Smart, the global retail empire where V. I. hopes to get some desperately needed funds for the struggling squad. But conscience seems to be in short supply at By-Smart...with the exception of Billy Bysen, the earnest teenage grandson of the chain’s gruff, tightfisted founder. And when Billy disappears—along with a mysterious document much desired by By-Smart’s management team—V. I. is hurled onto a twisted, body-strewn path that runs through Chicago’s dirtiest places and reveals some of its dirtiest secrets...

Chicago politics-past, present, and future-take center stage in New York Times -bestselling author Sara Paretsky's brilliant new V. I. Warshawski novel. 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. Old skeletons from the city's racially charged history, as well as haunting family secrets-her own and those of the elderly sisters who hired her-rise up to brush her back from the plate with a vengeance. A young cousin whom she's never met arrives from Kansas City to work on a political campaign; a nun who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. dies without revealing crucial evidence; and on the city's South Side, people spit when she shows up. Afraid to learn that her adored father might have been a bent cop, V. I. still takes the investigation all the way to its frightening end.

V.I. Warshawski returns in the spectacular new novel from the New York Times bestselling author. Carmilla, Queen of the Night, is a shape-shifting raven whose fictional exploits thrill girls all over the world. When tweens in Chicago's Carmilla Club hold an initiation ritual in an abandoned cemetery, they stumble on an actual corpse, a man stabbed through the heart in a vampire-style slaying. The girls include daughters of some of Chicago's most powerful families: the grandfather of one, Chaim Salanter, is among the world's wealthiest men; the mother of another, Sophy Durango, is the running for United States Senate. For V. I. Warshawski, the questions multiply faster than the answers. Is the killing linked to a hostile media campaign against Sophy Durango? Or to Chaim Salanter's childhood in Nazi-occupied Lithuania? As V.I. struggles for answers, she finds herself fighting enemies who are no less terrifying for being all to human.

Called a "career-crowning triumph"  and named one of the the top 50 mysteries and thrillers of the last 5 years by the London Sunday Times , Sara Paretsky is back with Critical Mass the latest entry in the VI Warshawski series, "Vic is at her stubborn, reckless, compassionate best in this complicated page-turner about selfish secrets passed down through generations. Paretsky has been on a roll lately, her long-running, trailblazing series at its most dynamic since the early days."  — Booklist on Critical  Mass 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, Kitty Saginor Binder.  When Kitty’s daughter finds her life is in danger, she calls Lotty, who, in turn, summons V.I. to help.  The daughter’s troubles turn out to be just the tip of an iceberg of lies, secrets, and silence, whose origins go back to the mad competition among America, Germany, Japan and England to develop the first atomic bomb.  The secrets are old, but the people who continue to guard them today will not let go of them without a fight.

Chicago’s V. I. Warshawski confronts crooked politicians and buried family secrets in this gritty mystery from New York Times bestselling author Sara Paretsky. No one would accuse V. I. Warshawski of backing down from a fight, but she’d happily avoid tangling with Chicago political bosses. Yet that’s what she ends up doing when she responds to a plea for help from an old high school flame, Frank Guzzo. Frank’s mother Stella was convicted of killing his kid sister, but now that she’s out of prison, she’s looking for exoneration. Even though the Warshawskis and Stella never got along, V. I. agrees to make a few inquiries after she sees how hard life has been on Frank and her other childhood friends. Only, that small favor leads her straight into the vipers’ nest of Illinois politics—and soon her main question isn’t about Stella’s case but whether or not she’ll make it out of this investigation alive... A Washington Post Best Mystery of 2015

LEE CHILD says she's "a genius." P.D. JAMES called her "the most remarkable" of today's suspense writers. STIEG LARSSON loved her work so much, he named her in his novels. And now SARA PARETSKY returns with the most extraordinary novel of her legendary career: FALLOUT . Before there was Lisbeth Salander , before there was Stephanie Plum , there was V.I. WARSHAWSKI . To her parents, she's Victoria Iphigenia. To her friends, she's Vic. But to clients seeking her talents as a detective, she's V.I. And her new case will lead her from her native Chicago... and into Kansas, on the trail of a vanished film student and a faded Hollywood star. Accompanied by her dog, V.I. tracks her quarry through a university town, across fields where missile silos once flourished — and into a past riven by long-simmering racial tensions, a past that holds the key to the crimes of the present. But as the mysteries stack up, so does the body count. And in this, her toughest case, not even V.I. is safe. Exciting and provocative, fiercely intelligent and witty, FALLOUT is reading at its most enjoyable and powerful.

Winner of the Sue Grafton Memorial Award! A Boston Globe Best Book of 2018! Acclaimed detective V. I. Warshawski tackles a pair of perplexing cases involving those closest to her in this compelling and timely adventure that centers on some of the most divisive and pressing issues of our time When V. I Warshawski gets word that her closest friend and mentor Lotty Herschel’s nephew has become a suspect in a murder, the legendary detective will do everything she can to save him. The cops found Felix Herschel’s name and phone number on the unknown victim’s remains, but Felix insists he doesn’t know why. As Vic digs deeper, she discovers that the dead man was obsessed with Middle Eastern archaeology―the first clue in a bewildering case that leads to a stolen artifact and a shadowy network of international criminals. But the trouble multiplies when Vic’s long-lost niece, Reno, goes missing. A beautiful young woman with a heartbreaking past and a promising future, Reno is harboring a secret that may cost her her life. V.I. can hear the clock ticking on her niece's safety and is frantic in her efforts to find her. Vic won’t leave any stone unturned until these very personal cases are cleared―a complex investigation that will entangle the Russian mob, ISIS backers, rogue ICE agents, a nefarious corporation preying on the poor, and a shady network of stock scams and stolen antiquities stretching from Chicago to the East Indies and the Middle East. In Shell Game , no one can be trusted and nothing is what it seems, except for the indomitable detective and her thirst for justice.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST “A proper hero for these times . . . To us, V.I. is perfect.” — THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "Sara Paretsky’s gloriously kick-ass private eye, V.I. “Vic” Warshawski, is back . . . in a political-rot thriller that’s the definition of perfection in the genre." — THE WASHINGTON POST Chicago’s legendary detective, V.I. Warshawski, knows her city’s rotten underbelly better than most, but she’s unable to avoid it when her goddaughter drags her into a fight over lakefront land use, in this propulsive novel from New York Times bestseller Sara Paretsky. 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 when her lover was murdered next to her in a mass shooting at an outdoor concert. Not only does Bernie plunge her and V.I. headlong into the path of some ruthless developers, they lead to the murder of the young man Bernie is dating. He’s a computer geek working for a community group called SLICK. V.I. is desperate to find a mysterious man named Coop, who roams the lakefront in the middle of the night with his dog. She’s sure he holds the key to the mounting body count within SLICK. Coop may even know why an international law firm is representing the mass murderer responsible for Lydia’s lover’s death. Instead, the detective finds a terrifying conspiracy stretching from Chicago’s parks to a cover-up of the dark chapters in America’s meddling in South American politics. Before she finds answers, this electrifying novel pushes V.I. close to the breaking point: People who pay to play take no prisoners.

"Readers can find comfort in the dedication V.I. gives the cries for help she hears from friends, neighbors, and strangers... Very few series authors deliver as masterfully as Sara Paretsky.” — San Francisco Book Review Legendary detective V.I. Warshawski uncovers a nefarious conspiracy preying on Chicago’s weak and vulnerable, in this thrilling novel from New York Times bestseller Sara Paretsky On her way home from an all-night surveillance job, V.I. Warshawski’s dogs lead her 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 of Chicago powerbrokers and mobsters who are prepared to kill the girl. And now V.I.’s own life is in jeopardy as well. Told against the backdrop of a city emerging from its pandemic lockdown, Overboard lays bare the dark secrets and corruption buried in Chicago’s neighborhoods in a masterly fashion.

Legendary detective V.I. Warshawski uncovers a mystery with roots dating back to the Civil War in this edge-of-your-seat thriller from New York Times bestseller Sara Paretsky. 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 protégées, 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 person in a city where she knows few people and doesn’t have her trusted contacts is hard, but not as hard as the brutally negative reaction to the detective from some of the locals. When V.I. finds Sabrina close to death in a remote house, she lands herself in the FBI’s crosshairs and faces a violent online backlash. The men running the county’s opioid distribution are also not happy. Discovering a dead body in the same house a few days later, V.I. is pitched headlong into a local land-use battle with roots going back to the Civil War. She finds that today’s combatants are just as willing as opponents in the 1860s to kill to settle their differences. V.I.’s survival depends on keeping one step ahead of players in a game she never intended to play, before the clock runs down.