Sara Paretsky: Fire Sale (UK 2006)

From the Publisher:
Death, conspiracy and burning buildings -- coming home wasn't meant to be like this.
A dangerous, depressed place reeking of bad memories, South Chicago is a neighbourhood private investigator V.I. Warshawski left a long time ago. But now she's back, drawn to the streets of her childhood once again to do a favour for a friend.

It was never going to be easy -- and when the mother of a local girl asks her to look into claims of sabotage at the factory where she works, V.I. quickly finds herself caught up in something far more sinister.

They say home is where the heart is, but now, as she lies by the roadside with a piece of hot, twisted metal embedded in her shoulder, looking up at the factory's smouldering remains, Warshawski is beginning to wonder whether a trip down memory lane was such a good idea after all...

Fire Sale marks the glorious next step for V.I. Warshawski -- one of the most complex, compelling characters in modern crime fiction -- and confirms Sara Paretsky's position as one of the world's leading crime writers.

Sara Paretsky: Fire Sale. A V.I. Warshawski Novel. Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN: 0340839104 (October, 2006), 402 p., £6.99.

Sara Paretsky: Fire Sale (USA 2006)

From the Publisher:
A conscience can weigh a PI down more than the heaviest firearm -- and get her into more trouble too. It's that nagging conscience that makes V. I. Warshawski agree to fill in as coach for the girls' basketball team at her South Chicago alma mater -- which in turn leads her to the headquarters of By-Smart, the global retail empire where V. I. hopes to get some desperately needed funds for the struggling squad. But conscience seems to be in short supply at By-Smart... with the exception of Billy Bysen, the earnest teenage grandson of the chain's gruff, tightfisted founder. And when Billy disappears -- along with a mysterious document much desired by By-Smart's management team -- V. I. is hurled onto a twisted, body-strewn path that runs through Chicago's dirtiest places and reveals some of its dirtiest secrets...

Sara Paretsky: Fire Sale. A V.I. Warshawski Novel. Signet Books, ISBN: 045121899X (September, 2006), 544 p., $9.99.

Sara Paretsky: Fire Sale (USA 2005)

From the Publisher:
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 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 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.

Sara Paretsky: Fire Sale. A V.I. Warhsawski Novel. Putnam's, ISBN: 0399152792 (June, 2005), 402 S., $25.95.