V.I. Warshawski Books In Order - Books In Order (2024)

1. Indemnity Only (1982)
2. Deadlock (1984)
3. Killing Orders (1985)
4. Bitter Medicine (1987)
5. Blood Shot (1988)
6. Burn Marks (1990)
7. Guardian Angel (1992)
8. Tunnel Vision (1994)
9. Hard Time (1999)
10. Total Recall (2001)
11. Blacklist (2003)
12. Fire Sale (2005)
13. Hardball (2009)
14. Body Work (2010)
15. Breakdown (2012)
16. Critical Mass (2013)
17. Brush Back (2015)
18. Fallout (2017)
19. Shell Game (2018)
20. Dead Land (2020)

1. Photo Finish (2011)
2. Wildcat (2017)
3. Death on the Edge (2018)

1. Windy City Blues (1995)

• Indemnity Only(1982)

• Deadlock(1984)

• Killing Orders(1985)

• Bitter Medicine(1987)

• Blood Shot(1988)

• Burn Marks(1990)

• Guardian Angel(1992)

• Tunnel Vision(1994)

• Hard Time(1999)

  See Also

  Sara Paretsky Books In Order - Books In OrderV.I. Warshawski Books In Publication & Chronological Order - BookSeries.orgFallout: A V.I. Warshawski Novel (V.I. Warshawski Novels) (Large Print / Paperback)Blacklist: a V.I. Warshawski novel

• Total Recall(2001)

• Blacklist(2003)

• Fire Sale(2005)

• Hardball(2009)

• Body Work(2010)

• Breakdown(2012)

• Critical Mass(2013)

• Brush Back(2015)

• Fallout(2017)

• Shell Game(2018)

• Dead Land(2020)

• Photo Finish(2011)

• Wildcat(2017)

• Death on the Edge(2018)

• Windy City Blues(1995)

Indemnity Only

In this gripping adventure the first V.I. Warshawski mystery America’s top private eye is tossed into a dangerous adventure when a seemingly straightforward assignment becomes complicated and deadly. Hired by a man who calls himself John Thayer, V.I. s assignment is to find Thayer s son Peter s missing girlfriend. But when V.I. Finds young Peter s dead body instead, her client disappears. Her efforts to track down her client and learn his true identity take her deep into a labyrinth of fraud and violence. By the time V.I. figures out the answers, she is in a race to find the missing young woman before the murderers do. Praise for the audio edition of Body Work: ‘Susan Ericksen s portrayal of Chicago private investigator V.I. Warshawski is pitch perfect.’ AudioFile, Earphones Award Winner Praise for the audio edition of Hardball: narrator Susan Ericksen ramps up the excitement in the story with a memorable voice that is intense and breathless. She s equally convincing as a gangb*nger, a gentle nun, a kindly neighbor, and a stroke victim. Each character shines as an individual, making this one of the best Sara Paretsky productions ever. AudioFile, Earphones Award Winner

Deadlock

From Sara Paretsky, New York Times bestselling author, comes another V.I. Warshawski novel. When Chicago Black Hawks hockey legend Boom Boom Warshawski drowns in Lake Michigan, his private eye cousin, the intrepid V.I. Warshawski, questions the accidental death report and rumors of suicide. Armed with a bottle of Black Label and a Smith and Wesson, V.I. follows a trail of violence and corruption to the center of the Windy City’s powerful shipping industry. Dodging attempts on her life with characteristic grit and humor, V.I. wends her way through a maze of grain elevators and thousand ton freighters to ferret out Boom Boom’s killer.

Killing Orders

Killing Orders, V.I. Warshawski’s third adventure, starts when her great-aunt Rosa summons the detective to her cold suburban home. Rosa made V.I.’s childhood miserable and the detective resents the command to help her aunt prove she didn’t embezzle five million dollars from a local Dominican priory. All hell breaks loose when a mysterious opponent tries to take Vic off the case by throwing acid in her eyes and burning down her apartment. And when a friend who’s involved in the case is brutally murdered, it begins to look as if Vic hasn’t got a prayer. But Warshawski continues to follow every lead, even when they point to some pretty unorthodox conclusions: Perhaps the Dominicans are covering up a financial scandal. Maybe the whole conspiracy is under the patronage of an international conglomerate, or of Don Pasquale, king of the Chicago mob. Worst of all, someone who’s close to Vic could be involved – her darkly handsome English lover, Roger Ferrant, or even Aunt Rosa herself.

Bitter Medicine

Chicago private eye V. I. Warshawski knows from the start that Consuelo Alvarado’s baby is trouble. Consuelo is sixteen. Diabetic. And the daughter of a friend. When she goes into labor too early, even V. I.’s wild drive to get her to the hospital can’t save either Consuelo or her child. Soon V. I. is investigating possible malpractice at the emergency room and falling for a doctor who works there. Mixing business and love is always bad medicine, but V. I. finds herself listening to her heart, not her head. And when a brutal murder and the violent destruction of a woman’s clinic put her at the center of a very dirty conspiracy, justice may be the only remedy for a hurt that cuts deep…
and chills right to the bone…
‘The plot is fast moving, the dialogue snappy, the premise for murder persuasive. This novel hasn’t a single snag in its springs.’ Chicago Sun Times ‘Paretsky is still the best…
She doesn’t pull punches.’ The Washington Post Book World

Blood Shot

V.I. Warshawski isn’t crazy about going back to her old south Chicago neighborhood, but a promise is something she always keeps. Caroline, a childhood friend, has a dying mother and a problem after twenty five years she wants V.I. to find the father she never knew. But when V.I. starts probing into the past, she not only finds out where all the bodies are buried she stumbles onto a very new corpse. Now she’s stirring up a deadly mix of big business and chemical corruption that may become a toxic shock to a snooper who knows too much. From the Paperback edition.

Burn Marks

Someone knocking on the door at 3 A.M. is never good news. For V.I. Warshawski, the bad news arrives in the form of her wacky, unwelcome aunt Elena. The fire that has just burned down a sleazy SRO hotel has brought Elena to V.I.’s doorstep. Uncovering an arsonist and the secrets hidden behind Elena’s boozy smile will send V.I. into the seedy world of Chicago’s homeless…
into the Windy City’s backroom deals and bedroom politics, where new schemers and old cronies team up to get V.I. off the case by hook, by crook, or by hom*ocide. From the Paperback edition.

Guardian Angel

Vic begins by investigating the mysterious death of a disaffected alcoholic vagrant this leads her to uncover a trail of financial fraud and corruption with a disconcerting personal twist. By the author of ‘Killing Orders’, ‘Bitter Medicine’ and ‘Burnt Marks’.

Tunnel Vision

Stubbornness has landed private eye V.I. Warshawski in big trouble at her Chicago office. With her grand old Loop building set to be razed, she’s become a hold out tenant amid frayed wiring and scary, empty corridors. Then she finds a homeless woman with three kids in the baseme*nt, and before she can rescue them, they disappear. Worst of all, she’s been implicated in a murder after the body of Deirdre Messenger, a prominent lawyer’s wife, turns up sprawled across her desk.V.I., who had volunteered with Deirdre at a women’s shelter, suspects her death is linked to a case of upper class domestic abuse so slickly concealed that the police refuse to believe it. Increasingly at odds with the cops, V.I. is blindly plunging ahead after the truth. And her path may lead to corruption at the highest levels. or deep into the abandoned tunnels beneath Chicago’s streets, where secrets are hiding in the dark like a child’s or V.I.’s worst nightmare.

Hard Time

Among the first, and perhaps the most compelling, female private investigators of contemporary fiction, Sara Paretsky’s incomparable character V. I. Warshawski at last returns to the page in her first full length appearance since 1994’s Tunnel Vision. Hard Time is the work of a master a riveting novel of suspense that is indisputably Paretsky’s best V.I. Warshawski novel yet. Multimedia conglomerate Global Entertainment has purchased the Chicago Herald Star, forcing the paper’s staff to scramble to stay employed. Reporter Murray Ryerson, V.I.’s longtime friend and sometime rival, manages to reinvent himself as the host of a television show on Global’s network. On her way home from a party celebrating Murray’s debut, V.I. almost runs over a woman lying in the street. Stopping to help, V.I. soon learns that her Good Samaritan act will drop her squarely in a boiling intrigue. In a case that forces her to go head to head with one of the world’s largest providers of private security and prison services, a case that exposes dark hidden truths behind the razzle dazzle of the entertainment industry, V.I. will be ahead of the game if she gets out alive.

Total Recall

The bestselling V.I. Warshawski novels have dazzled readers and earned the acclaim of critics everywhere. V.I. Warshawski rules, writes Newsweek, crowning her the most engaging woman in detective fiction. Of V.I.’s creator, the Chicago Tribune says Sara Paretsky has no peer. Now Paretsky brings her incomparable storytelling brilliance to her most powerful Warshawski novel yet. Total Recall follows the Chicago P.I. on a road that winds back more than fifty years and into an intricate maze of wartime lies, heartbreaking secrets, and harrowing retribution. For V.I., the journey begins with a national conference in downtown Chicago, where angry protesters are calling for the recovery of Holocaust assets. Replayed on the evening news is the scene of a slight man who has stood up at the conference to tell an astonishing story of a childhood shattered by the Holocaust a story that has devastating consequences for V.I. s cherished friend and mentor, Lotty Herschel. Lotty was a girl of nine when she emigrated from Austria to England, one of a group of children wrenched from their parents and saved from the Na*zi terror just before the war broke out. Now stunningly impossibly it appears that someone from that long lost past may have returned. With the help of a recovered memory therapist, Paul Radbuka has recently learned his true identity. But is he who he claims to be? Or is he a cunning impostor who has usurped someone else s history…
a history Lotty has tried to forget for over fifty years?As a frightened V.I. watches her friend unravel, she sets out to help in the only way she can: by investigating Radbuka s past. Already working on a difficult case for a poor family cheated of their life insurance, she tries to balance Lotty s needs with her client s, only to find that both are spiraling into a whirlpool of international crime that stretches from Switzerland and Germany to Chicago s South Side. As the atrocities of the past reach out to engulf the living, V.I. struggles to decide whose memories of a terrible war she can trust, and moves closer to a chilling realization of the truth a truth that almost destroys her oldest friend. With fierce emotional power, Sara Paretsky has woven a gripping and morally complex novel of crime and punishment, memory and illusion. Destined to become a suspense classic, Total Recall proves once again the daring and compelling genius of Sara Paretsky. From the Hardcover edition.

Blacklist

When Chicago Private Investigator V.I. Warshawski checks out reports of an intruder at derelict Larchmont Hall, she doesn’t expect to stumble over a dead man. But the murdered journalist is about to lead V.I. deep into the heart of a dark mystery, involving a terrified young Muslim boy, two of Chicago’s most powerful families, and a generation of shameful secrets political and sexual. It seems that somebody is desperate for the past to stay buried. But who? And why? And if attempting to bring the truth to light has already cost at least one man his life…
who’s next? /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content Privilege, politics, and perfidy jointly propel the circuitous plot of Blacklist, Sara Paretsky’s 11th novel featuring tenacious Chicago private eye V.I. Warshawski. By the time this story runs its course, V.I. will have harbored an alleged Arab terrorist, resurrected the ghosts of America’s 1950s anti Communist hysteria, and questioned the integrity of a man she once admired ‘to the point of hero worship.’ In other words, it’s a typical case for this hard headed, sarcastic, and perpetually sleep deprived sleuth.

Still suffering from ‘exhaustion of the spirit’ in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, V.I. is hired to find out who may be sneaking into a vacated suburban mansion. Geraldine Graham, the home’s 91 year old former owner, who still lives nearby, claims she’s seen lights in the attic at night. Our hero*ine suspects this is simply a bid by the wealthy dowager for greater attention, but agrees to do some nocturnal prowling only to stumble literally across the body of a dead black journalist, Marcus Whitby, in the estate’s ornamental pond and encounter a teenage girl fleeing the scene. The girl turns out to be Catherine Bayard, the granddaughter of Calvin Bayard, an unapologetically liberal book publisher who survived a hounding by the U.S. House Un American Activities Committee in the ’50s without being Blacklisted like so many of his authors. Digging deeper, V.I. learns that Whitby was doing research for a book about an African American dancer and anthropologist who had enjoyed Bayard’s support before she too was branded a Communist. Was Whitby killed en route to visit Bayard, one of Graham’s neighbors and a man who has strangely vanished from public view? And is there any connection between this murder and the disappearance of an Egyptian dishwasher, or the recent demise of a right wing attorney and Bayard foe, in whose apartment V.I. is attacked by an intruder?

Except for a few astounding turns of luck including the 11th hour discovery of a revealing audiotape left in a car’s player, Paretsky rolls out a credible yarn here, enriched by meticulous character development and an agreeably ambiguous conclusion. The author’s intention to link McCarthy era abuses with post 9/11 government assaults on civil rights is obvious, without being didactic, and it adds currency to a fictional investigation that’s already rife with sex, betrayal, and long held secrets among the rich. It’s good to see that V.I. the P.I. hasn’t lost the compassion or righteousness that first made her attractive two decades ago, in Indemnity Only. J. Kingston Pierce

Fire Sale

The astonishing new V. I. Warshawski novel from one of America’s foremost writers of crime fiction. V.I. Warshawski may have left her old South Chicago neighborhood, but she learns that she cannot escape it. When V.I. takes over coaching duties of the girls’ basketball team at her former high school, she faces an ill equipped, ragtag group of gangb*ngers, fundamentalists, and teenage moms who inevitably draw the detective into their family woes. Through young Josie Dorrado, V.I. meets the girl’s mother, who voices her worries about sabotage in the little flag manufacturing plant where she works. The biggest employer on the South Side, discount store behemoth By Smart, pays even less, and Ms. Dorrado doesn’t know how she’ll support her four children if the flag plant shuts down. The elder Dorrado’s fears are realized when the plant explodes; V.I. is injured and the owner is killed. As V.I. begins to investigate, she finds herself onfronting the Bysen family, who own the By Smart company. Founder William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Bysen, now in his eighties, has four sons who quarrel with each other and with him; the oldest, ‘Young Mr. William,’ is close to sixty and furious that his father doesn’t cede more power to him. And then there’s ‘Billy the Kid,’ Young Mr. William’s nineteen year old son, whose Christian idealism puts him on a collision course with his father, his grandfather, and the company as a whole. When Billy runs away with Josie Dorrado, V.I. is squeezed between the needs of two very different families. As she tries to find the errant teenagers, and to track down a particularly cruel murderer, her own life is almost forfeit in the swamps that lie under the city of Chicago.

Hardball

Chicago’s unique brand of ball is sixteen-inch slow pitch, played in leagues all over the city for more than a century. But in politics, in business, and in law enforcement, the game is Hardball. When V. I. Warshawski is asked to find Lamont Gadsden, a man who’s been missing for four decades, a search that she figured would be futile turns lethal. Old skeletons from the city’s racially charged history, as well as haunting family secrets – her own and those of the elderly sisters who hired her – rise up to brush her back from the plate with a vengeance. To complicate matters, Petra, a young cousin whom V.I. has never met, arrives from Kansas City to work on a political campaign. It does not take long for the high-spirited yet likable Petra to win over V.I.’s affections. When Petra goes missing after a break-in at the office, V.I. is determined to find her beloved cousin. As the search to locate Petra becomes more desperate, V.I. is also having difficulties tracking down Lamont Gadsden. Unable to catch a break, she learns that a nun who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., has died before she can reveal crucial evidence. V.I. herself almost dies in a blazing fire, and new information has emerged about her father’s role in a politically and racially charged trial almost forty years ago. Afraid to discover that her adored father might have been a bent cop, V.I. takes the investigation all the way to its frightening end.

Body Work

‘The thing about Sara Paretsky is, she’s tough-not because she observes the bone-breaker conventions of the private-eye genre but because she doesn’t flinch from examining old social injustices others might find too shameful and too painful to dig up.’ – The New York Times Book Review ‘Doctors take days off – why not PIs?’ V.I. Warshawski demands. But when America’s hardest-working private eye goes clubbing, a stranger is shot and dies in her arms. V.I. has been visiting Club Gouge, Chicago’s edgiest nightspot, 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 vets – and V.I.’s impetuous cousin, Petra. A tormented young painter shows up, too, and the intricate designs she creates on the Body Artist drive one of the vets into a violent rage. When the painter is shot, the cops figure it’s an easy collar – PTSD vet goes off the rails, stalks then kills young woman. But the vet’s family hires V.I. to clear his name, and the detective uncovers a chain of ugly truths that stretches all the way from Iraq to Chicago’s South Side.

Breakdown

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 one of the world’s wealthiest men; the mother of another, Sophy Durango, is the Illinois Democratic candidate for 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 Na*zi occupied Lithuania? As V.I. struggles for answers, she finds herself fighting enemies who are all too human.

Windy City Blues

It’s strictly Friends & Family as V.I. Warshawski, ‘the detective mystery fans have been waiting for’ Time, makes return appearances in a collection of stories that bring new meaning to ‘ties that bind.’ Decked out in her silk shirts and no nonsense Attitude, V.I. is out to make a living by the skin of her teeth. In ‘Grace Notes,’ V.I. has barely finished her morning coffee when she sees an ad in the paper asking for information about her own mother, long dead. The paper leads V.I. to her newfound Italian cousin Vico, who’s looking for music composed by their great grandmother. What’s the score? Clearly it’s something to kill for…
‘The Pietro Andromache’ finds V.I.’s friend Dr. Lotty Herschel with motive and means to dispatch her professional rival and steal his priceless statue. Lotty didn’t do it but does she know who did? V.I. soon cuts to the art of the case and it’s not a pretty picture at all!Summoned by an old high school friend to a race ‘At the Old Swimming Hole,’ V.I. ends up swimming with the sharks the FBI and a ruthless gambling kingpin in a pool of blood…
. And it’s only ‘Skin Deep’ when a relaxing facial transformation transforms a client into a stiff. V.I.’s pal Sal needs help. Her beautician sister Evangeline is prime suspect and V.I. has only eighteen hours to crack the case before it’s headline news…
‘ Three Dot Po’ proves there’s nothing like a dog. Especially a dog on the trail of her mistress’s killer, with V.I. in tow…
In ‘Strung Out,’ love means nothing and V.I.’s quick to learn the score as her old friend’s tennis champion daughter is under suspicion for strangling her father with a racket string. And there’s more, nine stories in all, in this masterful collection of short fiction starring V.I. Warshawski, ‘the most engaging woman in detective fiction since Dorothy Sayers’s Harriet Vane’ Newsweek. From the Paperback edition.