Blacklist: A V.I. Warshawski Novel (Hardcover)

by Sara Paretsky (Author) "The clouds across the face of the moon made it hard for me to find my way..." (more)
Key Phrases: private autopsy, dead carp, pocket organizer, New Solway, Marcus Whitby, Geraldine Graham (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Privilege, politics, and perfidy jointly propel the circuitous plot of Blacklist, Sara Paretsky's 11th novel featuring tenacious Chicago private-eye V.I. Warshawski. By the time this story runs its course, V.I. will have harbored an alleged Arab terrorist, resurrected the ghosts of America's 1950s anti-Communist hysteria, and questioned the integrity of a man she once admired "to the point of hero worship." In other words, it's a typical case for this hard-headed, sarcastic, and perpetually sleep-deprived sleuth.

Still suffering from "exhaustion of the spirit" in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, V.I. is hired to find out who may be sneaking into a vacated suburban mansion. Geraldine Graham, the home's 91-year-old former owner, who still lives nearby, claims she's seen lights in the attic at night. Our heroine suspects this is simply a bid by the wealthy dowager for greater attention, but agrees to do some nocturnal prowling--only to stumble (literally) across the body of a dead black journalist, Marcus Whitby, in the estate’s ornamental pond and encounter a teenage girl fleeing the scene. The girl turns out to be Catherine Bayard, the granddaughter of Calvin Bayard, an unapologetically liberal book publisher who survived a hounding by the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee in the '50s without being blacklisted like so many of his authors. Digging deeper, V.I. learns that Whitby was doing research for a book about an African-American dancer and anthropologist who had enjoyed Bayard's support before she too was branded a Communist. Was Whitby killed en route to visit Bayard, one of Graham's neighbors--and a man who has strangely vanished from public view? And is there any connection between this murder and the disappearance of an Egyptian dishwasher, or the recent demise of a right-wing attorney and Bayard foe, in whose apartment V.I. is attacked by an intruder?

Except for a few astounding turns of luck (including the 11th-hour discovery of a revealing audiotape left in a car's player), Paretsky rolls out a credible yarn here, enriched by meticulous character development and an agreeably ambiguous conclusion. The author's intention to link McCarthy-era abuses with post-9/11 government assaults on civil rights is obvious, without being didactic, and it adds currency to a fictional investigation that's already rife with sex, betrayal, and long-held secrets among the rich. It's good to see that V.I. the P.I. hasn't lost the compassion or righteousness that first made her attractive two decades ago, in Indemnity Only. --J. Kingston Pierce

From Publishers Weekly
Chicago private eye V.I. ("Vic") Warshawski needs all her strength and ingenuity to deal with the tragic effects of discrimination past and present in this riveting exploration of guilt and fear, the 12th installment in Paretsky's stellar series. Longtime client Darraugh Graham asks Vic to investigate his mother Geraldine's suspicion that trespassers are living in the empty mansion her father built in the suburban Chicago enclave where she has spent most of her life. Vic literally tumbles into trouble when, upon falling into a pond on the property, she comes up clutching the hand of a dead man. He is identified as Marcus Whitby, a young African-American journalist who was writing about members of the 1930s Federal Negro Theater Project especially a beautiful Negro dancer once championed by local liberals and blacklisted during the Communist witch hunt. Hired by Marcus's sister to look into his death, Vic spans cultures and generations in her investigation. Is Benji, the young Arab student sheltered in the mansion's attic by 16-year-old Catherine Bayard (whose politically daring publisher grandfather Calvin was once Vic's hero), somehow connected? Whether or not he has terrorist ties, Benji is at risk, so after Vic finds him she persuades Father Lou, a tough but caring community activist, to hide him in spite of post-9/11 dictums. Digging deeper, Vic must face disturbing allegations about Calvin Bayard and the likelihood that her lover, Morrell, on assignment in Afghanistan, is in danger. Paretsky reminds us that although victims change, prejudice is still alive and all too well. With this top-notch offering, she earns another vote of confidence for V.I.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Adult; First Edition edition (September 29, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399150854
• ISBN-13: 978-0399150852
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (85 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #688,717 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 12th installment, and Im not tired of this broad, October 28, 2003

By	Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The first Paretsky book I read, I knew I was going to have to read all of them. And I have, and I'm still not tired of this V. I. Warshawski broad, Chicago private eye.
Blacklist deals with the long-term effects of discrimination and guilt. A friend of Vic's (V. I.) asks her to investigate possible trespassing in the family mansion where she grew up. Here's a good scene: on her first foray into the property in years, she stumbles into a cruddy pond and comes up holding hands with some dead guy. Turns out he's a black journalist writing about stuff from the 30s. Things get deeper and murkier when the man's sister asks Warshawski to investigate the murder.
I get the feeling that Paretski has done some fantastic research in the writing of this book, as the content spans cultures, generations, and politics over 70 yrs as she proves that prejudice is alive and well in our world.
No big surprise there, but she does it so very, very well.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Blacklist, October 12, 2003

By	K. Freeman (Apple Valley, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I really enjoyed this book.

V.I. must face corruption among the scions of rich families, and the ghosts of 1950's witchhunts rise up to threaten the civil liberties of the modern day.

This was a stronger book, in my opinion, than the recent "recovered memory" Warshawski book, and probably better than the "women's prison" one as well, though I liked that. Paretsky has created a strong and real-seeming character who continues to appeal through multiple novels; the plot is both exciting and plausible; and, unlike in some installments, the antagonists in Blacklist are believable.

I like Paretsky's politics, as expressed in her books: left-wing in the sense of humanist concern for the working class, rather than in the sense of silly New Agey political correctness. This sensible point of view is one of the books' attractions, especially compared to the radical-right-wing paranoia of some other mystery/thriller authors.

Blacklist provides a good balance of action and character-centered drama, with some trenchant critique of modern politics thrown in. I highly recommend it.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Sidetracked into politics, June 18, 2005

By	David W. Nicholas (Montrose, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Blacklist (V.I. Warshawski Novels) (Paperback)

Way back in the day, there were only two good female private eye novelists. One was Sue Grafton, of the Alibi series, and the other was Sara Paretsky. Grafton seems to have run out of plot ideas (R was for Ridiculous) and Paretsky, who started as a fine detective novelist, has run loose of her editor and her common sense, and decided to lecture everyone about politics. She's been doing this for some time, with books criticizing HMOs, the Catholic Church, and various other subjects the author (and her main character) disapprove of, but Blacklist is probably the most egregiously political book she's written.

The story surrounds V.I. (our heroine) being sent to an abandoned and ancient estate in the wealthy suburbs to try and find if someone's prowling around the attic of the main building at night. A very wealthy old lady thinks so, and since she used to live there, and her son is one of V.I.'s clients who keeps her on retainer, she humors him, and stumbles across a body. This is the first difficulty in the book: when you come to the end of the story, it's clear that V.I. stumbling over the dead body is a terrific coincidence, and not that believable. Anyway, she investigates further, trying to find the trespasser and at the same time figure out how the dead body got dead.

This makes for a reasonably good mystery, but as others have noted the story's full of political rhetoric and opinion, all of it stridently left-wing. I'm not *just* talking about characters saying and doing things that are liberal. Since the author's politics are lefty also, she can make every conservative in her books a mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging 85-IQ Gestapo wannabe, and since she can, she does. The wealthy people in this book are (of course) skewered mercilessly, though if they're liberal their politics aren't criticized much. By the time you're done with 450+ pages of V.I. singlehandedly defying the Patriot Act and two or three whole police departments, outsmarting the FBI and the criminals, and railing repeatedly about that evil Patriot Act again, the story has sort of faded into the background and you're faced with a screed on politics.

One strange feature: the dead body in the book belongs to a journalist who's working on a book dealing with something called the Federal Negro Theater Project, part of the New Deal. V.I. gets told by another black journalist that the FNTP was killed by Congressional Republicans in the late thirties. This sounded really strange to me: Congressional Republicans killed a Federal program that funded Black art, and the Southern Democrats were nowhere to be found? I googled the FNTP and found a couple of sites that repeated this story, and then googled the Senate and House of Representatives to find out how they did it, and frankly I'm still at a loss. There were a measly 16 Republican Senators in 1937...which leaves 80 Democrats, way more than are needed to stop a filibuster. The Republicans in the House were outnumbered 3-1 by the Democrats. I have no doubt some Republicans were involved in shutting down the Federal Theater Project (the blacks were only part of it, and you should see the list of plays they were producing...some were definitely inspired by people sympathetic to Stalin et al) but they were powerless without allies in the Democratic camp. Paretsky, of course, places the blame solely at the feet of those evil right-wingers, and acts as if the Democrats were blameless. This sort of silliness needn't be in detective novels; readers ought to be able to read a book and be comfortable with some level of objectivity from the writer. Further, Paretsky is proudly introduced, in the about the author section, as having a Doctorate (!) in history, which means she reeeeaally should know this stuff without me telling her.

That aside ,the book isn't that bad, and if you can ignore the politics (or perhaps you agree with them) it's not the worst mystery in the world.