She Treads Softly: Pay Dirt

Saturday, April 6, 2024

Pay Dirt

Pay Dirt by Sara Paretsky
4/16/24; 400 pages
HarperCollins
V. I. Warshawski Series #22

Pay Dirt by Sara Paretsky is recommended for die hard fans of the long running series featuring Chicago PI V.I. Warshawski.

Friends of V .I. Warshawski send her to Lawrence, KS to recharge and relax while enjoying a weekend of college basketball. Angela, one of her protégées, is playing. After Angela's housemate Sabrina goes missing, V.I. agrees to help in the search for the young woman. V.I. faces plenty of local suspicion but no local support in her search. When Sabrina is finally found suffering from an O.D., V.I. gets her to the hospital. Then the FBI gets involved and question V.I. about her kidnapping the girl and a murder.

This 22nd outing of the P.I. is full of the expected twists and turns in an intricate, complicated plot. Warshawski is an intelligent, tough, tenacious, and insightful main character who does not give up even when everything is seemingly against her. The investigative part of the narrative is interesting and will hold the attention of most readers.

Looking back over the years to the novels much earlier in the series, I can recall great pleasure reading each new V. I. Warshawski novel. That has started to lessen with recent novels and I believe the series and I are sadly going to go our separate ways now for several reasons. Again, Paretsky makes sure Kansas is depicted as a backward place (getting tired of this habitual plot element). Present day Lawrence, KS, doesn't remotely resemble the city she portrays in the novel. Additionally my fluid rule that authors need to keep their editorializing on personal social/political views on contemporary topics to themselves as it is divisive and diminishes the novel applies. Thanks to HarperCollins for providing me with an advance reader's copy via Edelweiss. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.