HARDBALL. By Sarah Paretsky. Putnam. 446 pages. $26.95.
Some people call her Vic; some call her V.I. When she irritates people (a frequent occurrence), they sometimes just bark "Warshawski" at her. Readers call her one of the first and still one of the best female sleuths. Now, in her 15th adventure, we learn a few more names she picked up.
Her dad, Tony, a legendary Chicago cop, called her "pepperpot, … throwing dust up the nose of any man who came close to me." Her good friend Lottie says that people need her, and V.I.'s vocation keeps her from meeting her private needs. "So I'm a non-celibate nun," mutters Vic in response. Indeed, it is that very quality of service that causes all the problems in Hardball.
Begrudgingly, at the urging of a minister she just met, V.I. takes on the case of a man missing for 40 years. The man's dying aunt wants to know what happened to him; he disappeared the day after Martin Luther King Jr. marched through town and a young girl was killed. Vic gets a ridiculously small fee and short shrift from the man's mother, his best friend and the leader of his gang. Resistance never stopped this iconoclastic private eye before, however. She just keeps on digging.
As she works her way through the case, she works her way through Chicago. In Paretsky's narrative, Chicago takes on a richer context, a place where traffic is like "Mark Twain's old bromide, we all whine about it, but no one tries to fix it." The month is June, when "summer comes even to the heart of a great city." Part of the Chicago landscape she portrays so well is politics; the deeper she gets in the case, the closer she comes to bodies somebody wants to stay buried -- literally. Sleazy politicians, police corruption that may implicate her father and an extensive cover-up create havoc in her life. She barely survives a firebomb, and suddenly finds herself pursued by an alphabet of government agencies.
She stirs up the past, the present and the future, somehow even casting a shadow on a senate campaign. Before long, she gets the worst name she's ever been called: murderer.
Warshawski's resilience carries both her and this book through the finale that finds her careening around Chicago, worrying, "Did I bring destruction to everyone around me?" It's safe to say that she can play Hardball with the best of them, and she's the kind of player who wants the ball in her hand when the game is on the line.
Needless to say, she gets it, and the bad guys get theirs. Chicago is safe once again until Paretsky, almost as prickly and unpredictable as her private eye, decides to write another episode of V.I. versus the world.
Robert Moyer is retired from teaching drama at the UNC School of the Arts.
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