BREAKDOWN

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Breakdown, Sara Paretsky, G P Putnam's Sons, 2012, 431 pp

Summary from Goodreads: 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 weathiest men; the mother of another, Sophy Durango, is running for the 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 to answer these questions, she finds herself fighting enemies who are no less terrifying for being all too human.

 

 

My Review:

Sara Paretsky's 12th novel featuring private investigator V I Warshawski begins in a graveyard. While a group of tween girls hold a ritual centered around the shape-shifting heroine from a fantasy series they love, they come across a dead man stabbed through the heart. Instantly you are in the world of girls, cell phones, and secrets.

 

Enter V I, who must protect the girls, find the murderer, keep her young cousin from getting fired, and stay alive. She becomes embroiled with the rich, the politicians, the shady, and (as you may have suspected due to the title) the mentally ill.

 

Paretsky's liberal views are on full display but so are her emotions and her smarts. Because V I is in her 50s now, she has to husband her strength but even though the internet sometimes takes the place of physical investigations, it is also a danger because the bad guys are using it as well. Text messages can be hacked. Cell phones reveal any user's location. She also has to watch out for a rival investigator who is as crooked as they come.

 

Anyone who has read Paretsky knows what a long list of characters people her tales (I make my own list as I read) but she has also reached a new level in Breakdown: super tight plotting and fewer red herrings make this one easier to follow than some of her earlier books. The result is an increase in suspense with not a single lull in the action. V I's very savvy use of the media, that now rules our world, to expose the criminals is evidence that while the author was in her mid-60s when she wrote the book, she is as up-to-the-minute with the modern world as her youngest characters.

 

That brings me to my last point. The first book in the V I Warshawski series, Indemnity Only, was published in 1982. It involves corruption in the Unions, banks, and insurance companies. Hot topics at the time. All the books are set in Chicago. Reading them in the order they were written, as I have done, delivers a consecutive history of the city, spanning over thirty years. Quite a feat if you ask me.

 

 

(Breakdown is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)