Works by
Sara Paretsky
(Writer)
[June 8, 1947 - ]

Anthologies

• Chicago Blues (2007), Libby Fischer Hellman, ed.
  Nobody does Blues like Chicago. This collection of dark stories, from today's best Chicago crime fiction authors, captures the depths to which people sink when they run out of options. The emptiness and pain spawned by greed. The violence--or occasionally, the bittersweet redemption--that springs from a broken heart.
  
  The writers who live and breathe in Chicago make Chicago live and breathe in this stunning collection. Contributors include Barbara D'Amato, J. A. Konrath, Libby Fischer Hellman, Marcus Sakey, Max Allan Collins, Michael Black, Sara Paretsky, Sean Chercover, Stuart Kaminsky, and others.

• Sisters on the Case: Celebrating Twenty Years of Sisters in Crime (2007)
  Anniversary anthology of 25 short stories by today's best women mystery writers, including: Annette Meyers, Barbara D'Amato, Carolyn Hart, Charlotte MacLeod, Claire Carmichael McNab, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Eve K. Sandstrom, Kate Flora, Kate Grilley, Libby Fischer Hellman, Linda Grant, Margaret Maron, Medora Sale, Nancy Pickard, P.M. Carlson, Patricia Sprinkle, Rochelle Krich, Sara Paretsky, Sue Dunlap, Sue Henry, and more.

Biography/Memoirs

• Writing in An Age of Silence (2007)
  A revealing look at the power of speaking out, Writing in an Age of Silence describes Paretski's coming of age in a time of great possibility, during the civil rights movement, the peace movement, and the women's movement. Bestselling crime-writer Sarah Paretsky has won critical acclaim for her V.I. Warshawski novels, centered around one of the first and most popular female investigators in contemporary fiction. In this fascinating and personal account, Paretsky describes a life shaped by the desire to act. From the feminist movement—which triggered her aspirations to write and shaped the character of her female detective—to the Patriot Act and the liberties we have lost, Paretsky describes the struggle of one individual to find a voice. A moving call to action, Writing in an Age of Silence chronicles the social changes that have shaped contemporary America, and mirrors a desire for freedom, both personal and political, that many Americans will relate to today.

Fiction

V.I. Warshawski Mysteries

1. Indemnity Only (1982)
   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.

2. Deadlock (1984)
   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.

3. Killing Orders (1985)
   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.

4. Bitter Medicine (1987)
   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.

5. Blood Shot (1988)
   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.
   
   With Blood Shot, Sara Paretsky proves once again why her heroine, V I Warshawski, “is the detective many mystery fans have been waiting for” (Newsweek) and why, since her appearance on the mystery scene, detective fiction has never been quite the same.

6. Burn Marks (1990)
   “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.

7. Guardian Angel (1992)
   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 Picheas’ 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.

8. Tunnel Vision (1994)
   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.

9. Hard Time (1999)
   Among the first, and perhaps the most compelling, female private investigators of contemporary fiction, Sara Paretsky's incomparable character V I Warshawski at last returns to the page in her first full-length appearance since 1994's Tunnel Vision. Hard Time is the work of a master--a riveting novel of suspense that is indisputably Paretsky's best V I Warshawski novel yet.
   
   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.

10. Total Recall (2001)
    When a man claiming to be a survivor of the Nazi death camps seeks out his family among Lotty Herschel’s circle of friends, he forces her to confront a memory from the war she has long refused to think about. As a frightened V I watches her longtime friend and mentor unravel, she comes to Lotty’s help in the only way she know how—by investigating the survivor’s past. A case of insurance fraud on Chicago’s south side which V I is also investigating leads her to an international conspiracy reaching back to Nazi Europe and gives her the unexpected means to help save her friend.

11. Blacklist (2003)
    Eager for physical action in the spirit-numbing wake of 9/11, VI Warshawski is glad to take on a routine stake-out for her most important client, Darraugh Graham. His ninety-one year-old mother has sold the family estate, but Geraldine Graham keeps a fretful eye on it from her retirement apartment across the road. When Geraldine sees lights there in the middle of the night, Darraugh sends V I out to investigate—and the detective finds a dead journalist in the ornamental pond. The man is an African-American; when the suburban cops seem to be treating him as a criminal who stumbled to a drunken death, his family hires V I to investigate.
    
    As she retraces the dead reporter's tracks, V I finds herself in the middle of a Gothic tale of sex, money, and power. The trail leads her back to the McCarthy era blacklists, and forward to the ominous police powers the American government has assumed today. V I finds herself penned into a smaller and smaller space by an array of business and political leaders who can call on the power of the Patriot Act to shut her up. Only her wits, and an unusual alliance she forges with Geraldine Graham and a sixteen year old girl save her.

12. Fire Sale (2005)
    V I Warshawski may have left her old South Chicago neighborhood, but she learns that she cannot escape it. When V I takes over coaching duties of the girls' basketball team at her former high school, she faces an ill-equipped, ragtag group of gangbangers, fundamentalists, and teenage moms, who inevitably draw the detective into their family woes.
    
    Through young Josie Dorrado, V I meets the girl's mother, who voices her worries about sabotage in the little flag manufacturing plant where she works. The biggest employer on the South Side, discount-store behemoth By-Smart, pays even less, and Ms. Dorrado doesn't know how she'll support her four children if the flag plant shuts down.
    
    The elder Dorrado's fears are realized when the plant explodes; V I is injured and the owner is killed. As V I begins to investigate, she finds herself confronting the Bysen family, who own the By-Smart company. Founder William “Buffalo Bill” Bysen, now in his eighties, has four sons who quarrel with each other and with him; the oldest, “Young Mr. William,” is close to sixty and furious that his father doesn't cede more power to him. And then, there's “Billy the Kid,” Young Mr. William's nineteen-year-old son, whose Christian idealism puts him on a collision course with his father, his grandfather, and the company as a whole.
    
    When Billy runs away with Josie Dorrado, V I is squeezed between the needs of two very different families. As she tries to find the errant teenagers, and to track down a particularly cruel murderer, her own life is almost forfeit in the swamps that lie under the city of Chicago.

13. Bleeding Kansas (2008)
    Bleeding Kansas is about how the lives of ordinary people are effected by events over which they have little control. The book centers on the Grelliers and the Schapens, two families who have been farming in the Kaw River Valley for over a hundred-fifty years, and how their lives are affected by war and by the changing sexual and religious mores of the day. Susan Grellier, who yearns for the large sacrifices made by her husband’s pioneer ancestors in the battle against slavery, causes major upheavals in the lives of her husband and two children.
    
    When Gina Haring, who may or may not be a Lesbian, and who practices pagan rites, moves into an empty house near both the Schapen and Grellier properties, Susan’s involvement with her also stirs up the wrath of the Schapen clan, who are extremely conservative in their Christianity.  Susan’s decision to join Gina in opposing the Iraq war has cataclysmic results for her family. Gina has her own secrets, her own reasons for being in the Kansas countryside, and they’re not necessarily what the people around her imagine.
    
    Susan Grellier’s ardor for the anti-war cause so infuriates her son that he enlists and is killed, much to the glee of the Schapens, who celebrate every disaster that affects the Grelliers. His death devastates Susan, who retreats into a lethargy that nothing can shake. Not even the problems of her daughter, Lara, can rouse her.
    
    The Schapens are dairy farmers; one of their cows gives birth to what they think may be the Perfect Red Heifer, which the Torah requires for temple sacrifices. The extreme fundamentalism to which the Schapens subscribe means they want the temple rebuilt in Jersusalem—only then can Christ return, since he has to have a temple to destroy to fulfill New Testament prophecies. When the calf starts speaking ancient Hebrew, their dairy farm becomes a nine-day wonder.
    
    The book comes to its climax in the little shed the Schapens have built for their calf.  Susan ultimately has to rouse herself to rescue her daughter from imminent danger, but no one leaves the book completely unscathed.

14. Hardball (September 22, 2009 release)
    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.

Stand Alone Fiction

• Ghost Country (1998)
  The gritty adventures of V I Warshawski have made the Chicago PI a marquee name among today's sleuths and turned her creator, Sara Paretsky, into one of the mystery world's most popular authors. So it's rather surprising that Paretsky risks her commercial success with a new book that veers sharply from the sure-bet Warshawski series. But Paretsky's latest may be her best book yet; it shows amazing depth and emotion, offers richly complex characters and a stunningly original plot, and provides subtle but caustic commentary on today's social problems.

Short Stories

• Windy City Blues (1995)
  It's strictly Friends & Family as V I Warshawski, “the detective mystery fans have been waiting for” (Time), makes return appearances in a collection of stories that brings new meaning to “ties that bind.” 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” find 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!
  
  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.

• Women on the Case (1996)
  Women’s work is never done, as this brilliant and diverse collection eloquently demonstrates. Sara Paretsky presents women’s stories of crime and punishment on a global stage, with voices known and unknown at home and abroad. Familiar crime turf in America and England is expanded to Algeria, Russia, Germany, and South America. From wicked irony and white-collar crime in Amanda Cross’s “The Baroness” to the chilling “Only a Woman,” Algerian writer Amel Benaboura’s English language debut, here is a chorus whose individual voices celebrate women today—taking us from private eye purgatory to vacationer’s paradise, from the mean streets of despair to gilded hell in consumer heaven.
  
  Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth George, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Antonia Fraser, Sara Paretsky, and Linda Barnes demonstrate their keen insight into the twisted byways of the human mind. Liza Cody’s character races toward plastic surgery—and oblivion—in her desperation for a fresh face and an empty mind. Russian author Irina Muravyova, appearing in English for the first time, shows what powers women may call on in order to survive. Likewise Nancy Pickard’s private eye, Angela Fopeano, who is between “A Rock and a Hard Place,” dying of breast cancer and living with a client who has returned from the dead. And who knows what's “Beneath the Lilacs”? Nevada Barr's museum curator finds out as she digs too deep for lies...
  
  Eleanor Taylor Bland’s Asian-African college instructor plunges into a murder mystery to help unearth the truth of her own past...even as Susan Dunlap's dead-eye P.I. returns from purgatory to solve a case. Fittingly, Linda Grant’s English teacher turns to Shakespeare to find her sister's killer -- with a tragic twist. Here indeed are Women on the Case, from favorite sleuths Jemima Shores, Carlotta Carlyle, V.I. Warshawski, and Andrea Smith’s newcomer, Chicago Detective Ariel Lawrence, to wives, mothers, lawyers, politicians, writers, trained assassins, and more, in twenty-six takes that plumb the depth and breadth of a woman’s art.

• V I  x 2: Photo Finish and Publicity Stunts
  These stories, originally published separately in magazines are being printed together in a special new format and can be purchased through Women and Children First, Sara's favorite Chicago bookstore.