For reference here, I will start by quoting from what I wrote five years ago in a review of Sara Paretsky’s Shell Game:

If you like Donald Trump, don’t bother reading Shell Game, Sara Paretsky’s newest mystery novel: it will only irritate you. For the rest of us, it’s definitely worth reading.

For a long time I always read every Paretsky book, but then my interest began to flag. In recent years I resumed the goal of reading all of her books, and I’m happy to report that this one lives up to my expectations. Of course, as I suggested in my first paragraph, it has a great deal of politics in it, and that may be either a plus or a minus for you. It contains a lot about immigration, attitudes toward Muslims, attitudes toward undocumented immigrants, payday loan companies, evil lawyers, and so forth.

And now we have another Paretsky novel featuring V.I. Warshawski, with similar politics but much less obtrusively so. Not that it’s what you might call subtle, more that it sits in the background and permeates the entire book. Not only do we have the usual national politics, we also range from international to local politics, where we learn about corruption among political leaders in Chicago (and elsewhere in Illinois). I was shocked, shocked, I tell you.

Because the political issues are pervasive in the narrative, it’s much harder to identify quotes to pull, but here are a couple:

American medical insurance dictates that if you’re poor, you go to an emergency room, not to a doctor.

Surely no self-respecting law firm would shoot someone for even the most important and wealthy of clients. Then I thought of Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort and what they’d been willing to do for their clients.

Perhaps those excerpts are TMI, but I don’t think they‘re really spoilers. Suffice it to say that the unsung hero of the book (pun intended) is a once-successful musician who suffers from severe depression, paranoia, and homelessness, and no longer performs. All this is entwined with the politics of Chile (!) in the Allende-through-Pinochet era. You’ll have to read the book to see how all this ties together with rural Kansas and corruption in Chicago, but it really does all tie together. And yes, it’s a mystery, and yes, V.I. risks life and limb as usual, so don’t go into this expecting to find a cozy. But do read it — unless you wear a MAGA hat, of course.

Categories: Books