Chicago's Premier P.I.: V. I. Warshawski

Meeting an anonymous client on a sizzling summer night is asking for trouble. Especially when the client lies and tells V I Warshawski he's the prominent banker John Thayer, looking for his son's missing girlfriend. But V I soon discovers the real John Thayer's son -- and he's dead.

As V. I. begins to question her mysterious client's motives, she sinks deeper into Chicago's darker side: a world of gangsters, insurance fraud and contract killings. And while she must concentrate on saving the life of someone she has never met, it becomes clear that she is in danger of losing her own.

When Vic's cousin Boom Boom dies, she suspects that his fall was murder. Although he is a big hockey player, it is his connection with the family shipping business that gets Vic's attention. This was vaguely the plot for the V.I. Warshawski film (see below).

Once again Vic's family embroil her in murder and mystery, this time it's her hated Aunt Rosa, the treasurer of a priory and some counterfeit securities.

Despite the law, a pregnant woman is denied treatment at a hospital. Vic uses her skill in an attempt to see that justice is done.

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. (source: Amazon.com)

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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 back room 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 homicide. (source: Amazon.com)

V.I. Warshawski's Chicago neighbourhood is prospering. As it's out with the old and in with the new, long-term residents like elderly Hattie Frizell find themselves viciously under threat . . . But that's not all that's troubling V.I. When the body of her neighbour's friend is found washed up in the Sanitary Canal, her investigations lead her to uncover a world of corporate conspiracy and political corruption involving some of Chicago's most prestigious industrial players. And after several attempts on her life, it seems that this time, V.I. may have dug too deep . . . (source: Amazon.com)

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 basement, 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. (source: Amazon.com)

A collection of V.I. Warshawski stories.

The return of Vic after a five-year writing absence.

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. (Source: Amazon.com)

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 Nazi terror just before the war broke out. Now stunningly -- impossibly -- it appears that someone from that long-lost past may have returned. (source: Amazon.com)

By the time this story runs its course, V.I. will have harboured 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. (J. Kingston Pierce Amazon.com review)

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 gangbangers, 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 confronting 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. (source Amazon.com)

When V.I. Warshawski is asked to find a man who's been missing for four decades, a search that she thought would be futile turns lethal. Old skeletons from the city's racially charged history rise up to force her back with a vengeance - a nun who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. dies without revealing crucial evidence, and on the city's South Side, people spit when she shows up. The elderly sisters who hired her are also keeping important information to themselves.Then V.I. finds that her family is keeping secrets of their own. A young cousin whom she's never met arrives from Kansas City to work on a political campaign, but disappears under mysterious circumstances. Afraid to learn that her adored father might have been a bent cop, deception and corruption following her at every step, V.I. finds all her certainties under threat, but takes the investigation all the way to its frightening end. (source: Amazon.com)

The last thing V.I. Warshawski was expecting when she showed up at Chicago's Club Gouge was that she'd wind up cradling a dying performance artist in an alley. A PTSD-stricken soldier is presumed guilty of the murder, but it's up to V.I. to find out what kinds of shady activities are really happening at Club Gouge... (source: Amazon.com)

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 Nazi-occupied Lithuania? As V.I. struggles for answers, she finds herself fighting enemies who are all too human. (source: Amazon.com)

First Cases of a collection of fictional investigators including Delilah West, Jim Chee, Chip Harrison, Porfiry Rostnikov, Fred Carver, Nick Polo, Saxon, Aaron Gunner, Kate Shugak, Angela Matelli, Tess Monaghan, Lady Vespasia, and of course Stephanie Plum.

When private eye V.I. Warshawski is called out to a derelict drug house in a rural town just south of Chicago, she discovers something she wasn't expecting: the mutilated corpse of a man, dumped in a cornfield.

The deceased is the ex-lover of addict Judy Binder; an acquaintance of V.I.'s old friend, Lotty Herschel. Both Judy and her son Martin have disappeared without a trace, and it's up to V.I. to find out why.

The mystery throws V.I. into the fascinating world of physics and invention: a design which sparked the construction of the computer as we know it, the development of nuclear weapons, the wonder of Newton's prisms and a train of dramatic events that occurred in war-time Vienna over seventy years ago.

With a range of suspects too scared to open up, V.I. must delve deep into the past to find clues. Someone holds the answers to her questions - someone who will stop at nothing to prevent the truth from resurfacing . . . (source: Amazon.com)

Critically panned, according to rumour not much liked by Paretsky, this film combines elements of different novels. Avoiding the tendency of V.I. novels to focus on her family members, this V.I. Warshawski has Boom Boom, not a cousin, but a stranger and potential boyfriend. Reasonably good fun, it has the advantage of not trying to glamorise the seedier side of the PI business.