The CIA forced Lily to retire before she was ready. She'd spent forty years as a field agent. She'd been skilled, resourceful, dedicated – everything that makes a good agent, but she'd rubbed too many of her bosses the wrong way. They jumped on a botched op as an excuse to fire her. Now in her seventies, waiting in a doctor's office, she reads a magazine article that startles her out of retirement.The story casts doubt on everything she believed about her first – and happiest – pos...

The CIA forced Lily to retire before she was ready. She'd spent forty years as a field agent. She'd been skilled, resourceful, dedicated – everything that makes a good agent, but she'd rubbed too many of her bosses the wrong way. They jumped on a botched op as an excuse to fire her. Now in her seventies, waiting in a doctor's office, she reads a magazine article that startles her out of retirement.The story casts doubt on everything she believed about her first – and happiest – pos...

Sometimes, time doesn't heal all wounds...When a young woman named Sabrina disappears without a trace in Kansas, private investigator V.I. Warshawski knows she must act fast. But when she discovers Sabrina close to death in a drug house, the locals don't take kindly to her - and Sabrina's mother becomes suspicious. V.I. finds herself under the sharp gaze of the FBI - and the men running the county's opioid distribution. And when a dead body surfaces a few days late...

'Who're you working for then, Warshawski?' 'My cousin.' 'Boom Boom? He's dead.' 'I know. That's why I'm working for him.'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 o...

'Doctors take days off - why not PIs?' V.I. Warshawski demands. But when the hardest-working of private eyes goes out one night, a stranger is shot and dies in her arms. V.I. has been visiting Club Gouge, Chicago's edgiest night spot, where a woman known as the Body Artist turns her naked body into a canvas for the audience to paint on. The show attracts all kinds of people, from a menacing off-duty cop to Ukrainian mobsters and Iraq war veterans - and V.I.'s impetuous cousin, Petra. A tor...

The seventh novel in the V.I. Warhawski crime series, set in Chicago, from prize-winning author Sara Paretsky.V.I. Warshawski's Chicago neighbourhood is prospering. As it's out with the old and in with the new, long-term residents like elderly Hattie Frizell find themselves viciously under threat . . .But that's not all that's troubling V.I. When the body of her neighbour's friend is found washed up in the Sanitary Canal, her investigations lead her to uncover a world of co...

The Grelliers and the Schapens are two families who have been farming in the Kaw River Valley for over a hundred and fifty years, their lives connected through the generations by history and geography. Gina Haring, bringing with her the liberal air of the big city, moves into a dilapidated house near both families' properties. Gina has secrets, her own reasons for being in the Kansas countryside, and they're not necessarily what the people around her imagine. Susan's involvement with her s...

V.I. Warshawski's impossible god-daughter Bernie convinces her to look for August, a young film-maker who has disappeared. The evidence indicates that he has gone to Kansas in the company of Emerald, an older black movie actress who wants to film the story of her life. Her search takes V.I. from the military base Emerald was born on, to the farm where she grew up outside a university town, ploughing up past and present-day secrets as she goes.What is happening at the former nuclear...

When V.I.'s close friend Lotty Herschel is approached by a man claiming to be a fellow Holocaust survivor, she's forced to recall a painful past she's tried desperately to forget.Coming to Lotty's aid, V.I. decides to investigate the mysterious stranger. But her findings lead to the exposure of something much darker involving an international conspiracy reaching all the way back to Nazi Europe - as well as a shocking truth which could potentially devastate her friend . . .

In this spellbinding collection, Sara Paretsky showcases her extraordinary talents with fourteen short stories, including one new V.I. story and seven other classics featuring the indomitable detective.In 'Miss Bianca' a young girl becomes involved in espionage when she befriends a mouse in a laboratory that is conducting dark experiments. Ten-year-old V.I. Warshawski appears in 'Wildcat,' embarking on her very first investigation to save her father. A hardboiled N...

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 wher...

The sixth novel in the V.I. Warhawski crime series, set in Chicago, from prize-winning author Sara Paretsky.V.I. Warshawski receives an unwelcome shock when her aunt Elena arrives on her doorstep in the middle of the night, having fled from her burning hotel. But things go from bad to worse when Elena mysteriously vanishes and the corpse of her aunt's friend is discovered at a construction site.As V.I.'s investigation plunges her deep into the workings of t...