Fire Sale (V.I. Warshawski Novels) (Hardcover)

by Sara Paretsky (Author) "Going back to South Chicago has always felt to me like a return to death..." (more)
Key Phrases: chavo banda, recording pen, Fly the Flag, South Chicago, Buffalo Bill (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Private eye V.I. Warshawski takes a break from tony Lakeview to fill in for her old high school basketball coach on Chicago's South Side in her 12th adventure. Vic starts her volunteer stint looking for a team sponsor at megadiscount store By-Smart, whose founder, Buffalo Bill Bysen, is a fellow alum. Of all Bysen's cutthroat, cost-cutting family, only idealist 19-year-old Billy shows any interest in helping the team. When he disappears, his frustrated father hires Vic to find him. The mother of a high school basketball player also hires Vic to investigate sabotage at the flag factory where she works—an investigation cut short when the factory blows up before Vic's eyes. Things go no better at school or at home, and clues pile on but they don't add up. Vic takes her lumps as she makes her way from a fundamentalist church, where the pastor goes to extremes for his flock, to the city dump, where villains try to bury their secrets. Paretsky has recently tackled the Holocaust (Total Recall) and globalization (Hard Time); here she explores the struggles of the working poor and the schemes of the rich and infamous. Packed with social themes and moral energy, held together by humor, compassion and sheer feistiness, this novel shows why Paretsky and her heroine are such enduring figures in American detective fiction.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Long-running mystery series have a way of losing readers over time, but anyone who has drifted away from Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski should promptly return to the fold. The thirteenth Warshawski novel is one of the best, primarily because it takes V. I. back to her South Chicago roots, filling in fascinating backstory on the sleuth's evolution and effectively utilizing both the city's broad-shouldered past and its radically globalized present. V. I. returns to her old neighborhood--in the far southeast corner of Chicago--to fill in for her former high-school basketball coach, who is fighting cancer. Confronted by a dilapidated gym and a team made up mainly of gangbangers and single mothers, V. I. feels overwhelmed--for about five minutes, before she reacts with typical ferocity, driving her players and doggedly pursuing corporate funding for the team. It's the latter that takes her to By-Smart, South Chicago's main employer, run by a bigoted, born-again billionaire. Soon V. I. is caught in the middle of a Romeo and Juliet romance between the son of Mr. By-Smart and the daughter of a Latina single mother, whose employer's factory has just been destroyed by fire. Paretsky has never been better than she is here at evoking a sense of place--abandoned and rusting steel mills casting long shadows over the difficult lives of largely immigrant families. Nothing seems forced as Paretsky plays socioeconomic realities against a universal story of passion and jealousy, building the plot from the marshy ground up and allowing Chicago to muscle its way into a costarring role. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Adult (June 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399152792
• ISBN-13: 978-0399152795
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #246,150 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still the Best in her Field., November 2, 2005

By	N. Richardson "nano" (Los Angeles, California United States) - See all my reviews

Sara Paretsky, along with Marcia Muller, created a subgenre in the mystery field with her series of Warshawski novels. And from the beginning, she stood apart from the rest by looking at the important issues of our time, framing them in the lives of ordinary people, while using the conventions of the genre to hook readers into compelling plots, dialogue and...suspense and action.

Like P. Schumacher, I have often compared her to Dickens because of her ability to create fabulous characters (including some terrific villains) while making complex political issues accessible to people who otherwise are turned off to politics.

In taking on the Walmartization of America, she has plenty of material. And she explores the issue from a variety of angles, including from the point of view of people forced by circumstance to be trapped in chronic underemployment. At the same time, she shows how the predatory practices of BigBox America destroys communities, including small business.
Any she does this while weaving a darn good story.

However, I would suggest the reader avoid at all costs the Brilliance Audio edition as voiced by the worst narrator working in AudioBooks today. Sandra Burr, despite the "spotlight" reviewer's opinion is totally wrong from this or any book for adults. She has no understanding of the characters or the book's subject matter, and her characterizations truly hurt the book. She is distracting when she gives a 19 year old young man the voice of a 12 year old girl....and everytime she does dialogue, my immediate impulse was to to track to down Paretsky's agent and demand she renegotiate her contract with Brilliance.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AN ACES DETECTIVE STORY READING, July 19, 2005

By	Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This review is from: Fire Sale (V. I. Warshawski) (Audio CD)

Able voice performer Sandra Burr gives another aces reading as she takes on the persona of dauntless private detective V. I. Warshawski. There's humor, suspense, drama and, perhaps best of all, V.I. on her old stomping grounds, the South side of Chicago.

She's returned there on a kind of errand of mercy - filling in for the coach of the girl's basketball team at her old high school. Such girls V.I. didn't see when she was in high school - high-strung, unmarried moms, a bit of a motley bunch. Nonetheless, V.I. digs in with her usual vigor and sets out to get some corporate backing for the team. First stop is By-Smart, a hugely successful discount store owned by one of her former classmates, Buffalo Bill Bysen. Seems that helping the team isn't high on Buffalo Bill's agenda. Nor, in actuality, is seeing V.I. again. That is until his son disappears.

The vanished young Bysen isn't V.I.'s only challenge - a mother of one of her team members suggests there's foul play at the factory where she works. That's an understatement because the factory soon explodes injuring V.I. and killing the owner.

As V.I.'s investigation continues she also finds an updated West Side Story only from the South Side of Chicago - Bysen's son has run away with a young Latina.

Although this is Paretsky's 12th time out with a Warshawski novel, V.I. is as fresh and appealing as ever.

Good listening for detective story fans.

- Gail Cooke

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Paretsky is better than ever, July 4, 2005

By	Mary McCarthy - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I don't know about you, but I've had some disappointments of late with some of my favorite mystery authors. Let's not name names. You know you agree with me: they're writing too many books and putting too little into them.

But not Sara Paretsky! I've been a fan for years, and the V.I. books just keep getting better. This one is well-written with a great plot line. It's a treat you owe yourself for the heat of this summer.