Sara Paretsky: Critical Mass, Berkeley (Penguin Random House USA) 9780451468185, paperback

(German Edition available as hardback "Kritische Masse, Ariadne Verlag)

  
Having ditched a novel in frustration after 200 pages, which one shall remain unnamed, I needed to return to safer author ground and a thriller it had to be. Sara Paretsky has been delivering excellent novels with gutsy female private investigator V.I. Warshawki  at their heart for years and an arm chair trip to my beloved Chicago sounded great.  I read a review rating her latest book “Critical Mass” with 5 stars; I can second that, she kept me glued.  How Paretsky pulls off writing about the complicated matter of nuclear physics  as well as stringing together a complicated  567 pages plot with numerous protagonists and historical details has my absolute admiration.  The thriller takes many twists and turns until finally racing to a satisfying ending.

Dr. Lotty Herschel, V.I.’s dear motherly friend in Chicago, had to flee the Holocaust 1937 via the kinder transport from Vienna to England and finally ended in Chicago as an adult where she became a highly regarded medical doctor. One of her childhood friends, Kitty Sagnior Binder, whom she fell out with later, fled with her leaving behind Kitty’s mother Martina who as a single mother was one of the most talented female physicists in Austria having been forced to work in a Nazi nuclear project.  Both Kitty and Lotty’s families perished in the Holocaust.  Kitty’s only daughter Judy had become a drug addict and dealer but when Lotty receives a desperate call from her fearing for her life but leaving no contact details, she hires Warshawki to find her.  Judy had abandoned her only child Martin as a baby leaving him with her mother Kitty. As a teenager the boy showed an exceptional scientific mind much like his lost great Jewish grandmother.  VI has an unpleasant conversation with paranoid Kitty finding her in a house with high security alarms and scared to death of unknown intruders.  She also learns that Martin, an adult now, has disappeared from his work at a computer company and has been missing  ever since.  Kitty’s seemingly unreasonable fear soon turns into deadly reality and VI becomes embroiled in chase that has its origin in Nazi Germany with some very high powered people unafraid of using all means to protect their secrets and wealth.