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...

Meeting an anonymous client on a sizzling summer night is asking for trouble. Especially when the client lies and tells V I Warshawski he’s the prominent banker John Thayer, looking for his son’s missing girlfriend. But V I soon discovers the real John Thayer’s son – and he’s dead.As V I begins to question her mysterious client’s motives, she sinks deeper into Chicago’s darker side: a world of gangsters, insurance fraud and contract killings. And while she must concentrate on saving...

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 find 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 power brokers and mobsters who ...

A SUNDAY TIMES CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH PICK******A V.I. Warshawski novel from the New York Times bestselling author pits acclaimed detective V.I. Warshawski against some of today's most powerful figures.'The 19th Warshawski novel is also a panoramic vision of Chicago at a time when the city is so polarised that decent people don't know who to trust' The Sunday Times

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...

'A novel full of surprises... It's vintage Paretsky, and hard to put down' - The Sunday TimesNamed Top 10 Thriller of 2020 by KirkusChicago is the city of broad shoulders, but V.I. Warshawski knows its politics: "Pay to Play". Money changes hands in the middle of the night; by morning, buildings and parks have been replaced by billion-dollar projects.Private investigator V.I. gets pulled into one o...

The seventeenth V.I. Warshawski thriller from one of America's greatest female crime writers, and winner of Theakstons Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award 2015.For six stormy weeks in high school, V.I. Warshawski thought she was in love with Frank Guzzo. He broke up with her, she went off to college, he started driving trucks for a living. She forgot about him until the day his mother was arrested for bludgeoning his kid sister Annie to dea...

When private eye V.I. Warshawski is called out to a derelict drug house in a rural town just south of Chicago she discovers something she wasn't expecting: the mutilated corpse of a man dumped in a cornfield.It is a discovery that throws V.I. into the fascinating world of physics and invention: a design which sparked the construction of the computer as we know it the development of nuclear weapons the wonder of Newton's prisms and a train of dramatic events that occurred in war-tim...

'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...

While driving home after celebrating friend Murray Ryerson's big break into TV hosting, V.I. almost collides with a fatally wounded woman lying in the street.The deceased is Nicola Aguinaldo, former employee of security giant B.B. Baladine and recent prison runaway. Taking on the case, V.I. finds herself plunged into a sinister network of corruption that pits her against the police, the prison and the entertainment industry - with potentially lethal results.

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 . . .