It’s a plot device long used in the traditional murder mystery: A detective, hoping to force the culprit to confess, gathers the suspects together while he summarizes the case. Chicago private investigator V.I. Warshawski employs this stratagem in Sara Paretsky’s latest novel, Body Work, but V.I.’s version of a confrontation scene is so far from traditional that readers will gasp – and perhaps smile as well.
Sara Paretsky has always confounded her reader’s expectations. In the 1982 work Indemnity Only, the first of her V.I. Warshawski series novels, Paretsky rejected the presentation of the female detective found in the cozy mystery tradition and embraced instead the depiction found in “hard-boiled” fiction. Like Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, V.I. Warshawski claims closer kinship with Philip Marlowe than with Jane Marple.
Released on August 31, 2010, Body Work begins with V.I. cradling the body of young Nadia Guaman in her arms. Nadia has been shot dead outside Club Gouge, the Chicago nightclub where a woman known as the Body Artist performs. Nadia is among those who have accepted the Body Artist’s challenge to use her body as a canvas for their art.
Nadia’s drawings, though, enrage Chad Vishneski, an Iraq war veteran who is in the audience. When Nadia is killed, the police go to Chad’s apartment to arrest him and find him comatose. Hired by Chad’s father to prove Chad's innocence, V.I. finds a connection between Chad’s war experiences, the Chicago mobster Anton Kystarnik and the private security contracting firm Tintrey for which Nadia’s sister Alexandra worked before her own sudden death in Iraq.
Body Work continues the concern with political and social issues Paretsky has shown in her earlier novels. New York Times critic Marilyn Stasio said of Paretsky’s preceding novel, Hardball (2009),“The thing about Sara Paretsky is, she’s tough — not because she observes the bone-breaker conventions of the private-eye genre but because she doesn’t flinch from examining old social injustices others might find too shameful (and too painful) to dig up.” This comment applies equally well to Body Work.
Body Work demonstrates Paretsky’s concern with the plight of Iraq war veterans, with social attitudes to female sexuality and with the consequences of the U.S. military’s reliance on outsourcing. These issues, handled by a lesser writer, could easily overwhelm the book; but Paretsky dramatizes her concerns instead of sermonizing about them.
It is in the characterization of its protagonist, though, that Body Work differs most from its predecessors. Paretsky presents V.I. as growing more aware of her own increasing personal vulnerability. Although the tough 50-year-old detective knows she is not as physically fit as she once was, her emotional vulnerability concerns her more. The quintessential hard-boiled detective now resents being considered hard, as is evidenced in a scene with her 23-year old niece Petra.
A consequence of V.I.‘s greater vulnerability, though, is greater self knowledge. Reproached for appearing to want to control the lives of those she helps, V.I. confides in a letter to her lover, Jake Thibaut, “I think I am driven more by despair, even, than by confidence, especially the despair of seeing so much misery around me.”
In the YouTube video below supplied Putnam Books, Sara Paresky echoes V.I.’s conclusion. Paretsky remarks that V.I.'s “toughness comes out of looking at the massive mountain of injustice that she is trying to tackle.”
For more information:
Investigation Discovery’s ’Hardcover Mysteries’ to premier on October 11, 2010
Sisters in Crime supports libraries through its ’We Love Libraries!’ lottery
More mystery series titles appear on NPR and Seattle Times lists of 2009’s best books
Sara Paretsky named 2011 Mystery Writers of America Grand Master
10th National Book Festival scheduled for September 25, 2010
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