Sara Paretsky: Brush Back, 9780399160578, hardback, Putnam, Penguin Random House US, (paperback: June 2015)

I have been following Sarah Paretsky and her heroine V.I. Warshawski for quite a while now, almost from book one.  The Chicago setting of her thrillers, one of my favorite towns, appeal to me as does the character of gutsy, headstrong female private eye VI Warshawski.  It is always like a trip to Chicago without leaving home.

In her latest book VI has aged, is around fifty now, with musician gentleman friend Jake living next door, her wonderful old neighbor Mr. Contreras still looking after her and her dogs plus a houseguest, Bernie, Boom-Boom’s goddaughter, living with her for the summer.

Starting to feel that climbing walls and chasing the bad guys is not quite as easy physically and appealing as it used to be, VI is not quite as confrontational as in previous novels. When her old high school flame Frank Guzzo shows up in her office asking for her help to exonerate his mother  after her release from prison, where she did 25 years being accused of murdering her daughter Annie, unpleasant memories and feelings from VI’s past of  growing up in Chicago’s dangerous South side resurface.  She has little desire to revisit these wounds but feels obliged to help her old friend.   When she reluctantly starts her investigation by asking Frank’s mother Stella some unwelcome questions,  Stella answers by becoming physically violent, making it hard for VI to believe in Stella’s innocence and easy to walk out of the case. When the Guzzo family starts slandering the image of VI’s beloved cousin and famous baseball player Boom-Boom on the basis of a supposedly recently discovered  diary of the murdered Annie, VI is upset enough that reopening the investigation seems the only way forward.  During the course of 458 pages,  VI unravels several buried family secrets, tries to find her way through a spider web of shady connections and discoveries,  gets beaten up by gangsters when confronting crooked Chicago politicians, lawyers and business men seriously endangering her and Bernie’s life towards the end of the book.

Although the book is very long, I did not feel bored, enough new worms crawl out of the can to keep you entertained until the very end.  I did feel the story could have been more compressed but all in all, Paretsky and VI Warshawski as we like her !