Blacklist

Sara Paretsky is back with all cylinders firing and Blacklist, in which her dogged heroine VI Warshawski makes a very welcome reappearance, is quite as deliciously convoluted and incident-packed as the author's best work. Victoria Iphegenia has taken a battering in the last few books, but is back as resourceful and tenacious as ever.

Here, Paretsky dispatches her Chicago private investigator on a particularly surrealist adventure. VI takes a tumble into a dark overgrown pond while on night-time surveillance at a secluded mansion and encounters a dead journalist in the weeds. The subsequent police investigation strikes her as cursory and VI puts this down to the fact that the victim was black and that her body turned up in a well-heeled white residential area. As always, miscarriages of justice and police indifference have a galvanizing effect on Warshawski, who believes the death is not suicide but murder and her own investigations uncover some dark family secrets.

As often before, the police place obstructions in her path--but this time it appears to be two separate police departments and some very well-placed and influential people. Things are complicated by VI's involvement in another case--a youth with a possible terrorist background who is persona non grata with the government after 9/11. This is Paretsky as her admirers like her: Warshawski taking a dive into a heady brew of corruption, both personal and political. --Barry Forshaw

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