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V.I. "Vic" Warshawski is back, and shes feeling less badass than usual.
PAY DIRT, Sara Paretsky's 22nd novel to feature the quick-witted, tough talking, hard-hitting Chicago private eye, opens with a sad, weary, troubled Warshawski; she's barely sleeping, barely eating, with barely enough energy to leave her apartment. She's having difficulty focusing on the career that she loves, even though it has led her to the brink of death dozens of times. Her trademark resilience seems to have abandoned her. Following the events of OVERBOARD, Paretsky's previous novel, Vic is understandably traumatized. Understandably, that is, for anyone who's read the previous novel. Since 1982, when the iconic Chicago detective kicked open the door for dozens of fictional female crimefighters to follow, each of the books has built on its predecessors, but stood alone as a smart, tightly plotted story; the series has always been consistent without being repetitive. In this one, however, Vic is so tortured by what she saw at the end of OVERBOARD, that she, and the plot, have trouble moving forward for the first hundred pages or so.
It doesn't help that that this is one of the few books in the series that is not set in Chicago, the city portrayed in such vivid detail that it is as much a character in those novels as the cops, criminals, and other colorful urbanites who inhabit it. This time, however, Vic is persuaded, early on, by the well-meaning, bossy young Bernadine a friend of the family who is sort of an honorary goddaughter to travel to Lawrence, Kansas with a bunch of college athletes, to see a mutual friend compete in the women's NCAA basketball tournament. Unfortunately, Kansas is just not as compelling a setting as Chicago, although things start to gather speed when one of the friends goes missing the night after the big game, and it falls on Vic to find her. She succeeds of course, within a day or two, finding the terrified, drug-addled young athlete, laid low by a post-surgery opioid addiction, in an abandoned house on the outskirts of town. Unfortunately a number of resentful locals, jealous of her skills and suspicious of her motives, blame "that Chicago detective," spreading rumors about how she lured the victim to the premises with the promise of drugs. Matters take a turn for the worse when Vic, searching for clues that will identify the real drug dealers and clear her name, returns to the house and finds a dead woman in the basement. One of the most entertaining details is the fact that the deceased was, in life, completely unlikeable; figuring out who the heck she was and what she was doing in town is almost as much of a mystery as the question of who killed her.
From here on, things take off, and despite the disappointing absence of some of the most memorable Chicago characters (Vic's friend Dr. Lotty, the imperious, fiercely intelligent, Holocaust survivor talk about resilience! appears in name only; her neighbor Mr. Contreras - one of the great sidekicks in all contemporary crime fiction shows up in only one scene, at the very end) the last half of the novel zips along, developing into a solid, urgently-paced Warshawski story, full of narrow escapes, misogynist bad guys, villainous, dysfunctional families, and intrigue that started shortly after the Civil War and has continued into the present day. Vic has always been at her best when the odds are against her, and the final chapters of PAY DIRT prove to be no exception.
It's a pleasure to see V.I. Warshawski get her groove back, and return to her eccentric chosen family and the gritty streets of her beloved hometown. In the "postscript" to the novel, author Paretsky says of her creation, "the strange world we inhabit these days has taken a toll on her
She needs some time off," but promises faithful readers that "she'll be back, ready to look danger in the eye and take it on." For readers old and new, it would be worth using that time to revisit some of the earlier novels, the ones that have genuinely changed the course of detective fiction - especially for women - over the past twenty-two years, while looking forward to the fulfillment of that promise.
§ Mary-Jane Oltarzewski is an Assistant Teaching Professor with the Rutgers University Writing Program. In her spare time, she enjoys coffee crawls, listening to jazz and show tunes, and spending time in the Catskills with her husband, and a cat who bears a strong resemblance to the Reviewing the Evidence mascot.
Reviewed by Mary-Jane Oltarzewski, December 2021
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