VI loose in her old S. Chicago hood, chasing shadows...We've read the entire prior dozen entries in Paretsky's Chicago leading lady, private investigator V.I. Warshawski series -- so we guess we're fans at least by default. We were definitely not fond of her just prior "Blacklist" which was so full of politics that the weak story tired us readers almost as much as VI herself. That VI never gets paid except for boring background checks that could hardly keep her going doesn't get in the way of her mostly unfocused romps about Chicago chasing down just about anything that crops up, whether meaningful or even just interesting or not. Unfortunately, to us "Fire Sale" is yet another undistinguished addition to VI's ramblings. She is coerced into a daily substitute girl's basketball coaching job (for free of course) at her old high school in what is now little better than a ghetto in South Chicago. Next she's asked (by one of the mothers) to check on possible sabotage at a nearby low-brow flag-making company, one with tangential ties to a big, family-owned retail conglomerate called By-Smart, a Wal-Mart lookalike with no attempt to conceal the copycat story line. One of the founder's grandsons is a sensitive guy who has been working at one of their warehouses in (guess where) S. Chicago, and falls for one of the Latino basketball players. Then the flag company blows up, killing its manager -- but for some reason nobody but VI (including the police) is even interested in what surely must be an arson turned murder. And so the plot plods along for a few hundred pages, with plenty of unrelated visits to VI's boyfriend Morrell thrown in for sexual tension. In the end, another murder (as well as several injuries to our leading lady, none of which slow her down of course) finally leads to a few chapters of suspense as the grand unveiling of the whole scheme reveals who the bad guys were and for whom they were working - with few surprises. This novel just doesn't give us much to care about. A hundred pages of scene setting with the girls basketball team is hardly entertaining, the 200 pages of By-Smart family bickering and grandstanding was nothing but hokey, and in the end, we just wanted it over. If we're being callous about the underlying socio-economic commentary, so be it - that's not why we read detective stories. What we'd really like to see is VI get a case with some mystery to it we would care about, get paid for being the professional investigator she is supposed to be, and stop walking into obvious injury traps without the slightest precaution. We guess we want a plot with more teeth, more plausible detecting on VI's part, and enough suspense to get us reading through her story in a few hours rather than a week or more. We'll conclude this time with the same thought we did last time - maybe VI's writer is getting as tired of her as we are.
Balancing social commentary with a riveting story can be a difficult challenge for some authors, but a few of them manage to succeed at it. Sara Paretsky, a grande dame of the private eye genre, is one of those authors who manages to do it well.In her novel "Fire Sale", Paretsky's beloved private eye, V.I. Warshawski, encounters her toughest battle yet: class warfare.Warshawski reluctantly agrees to coach a girl's basketball team in her old high school in south-side Chicago. Outdated facilities, budgetary cuts, and a neighborhood in which a majority of the kids live below the poverty line make sports an important part of these kids' lives, but they can barely pay for uniforms and equipment, let alone the costs and fees of keeping a sports team going.Warshawski has the bright idea of trying to recruit "Buffalo" Bill Bysen, the millionaire owner of the By-Smart Corporation, a multi-national that owns and operates a chain of discount box stores, to help fund the team. (Clearly, Bysen is a thinly-veiled Sam Walton, owner of Walmart.) She gets an in with Buffalo Bill, via his grandson, Billy the Kid, who is foreman of the factory at the world headquarters of By-Smart, also conveniently located in south-side Chicago.Before Warshawski even has a chance to explain the win-win of a By-Smart-sponsored basketball team and the positive PR it would give to By-Smart, Buffalo Bill shoots her down, complaining that he doesn't want to give any more "handouts" to more lazy welfare recipients. When Billy the Kid goes missing (along with one of her high school players) with some important company documents and a local factory is destroyed by a mysterious explosion, killing the owner, Warshawski soon finds herself with her hands full.Surprisingly, this is my first Paretsky novel. I usually don't like starting in the middle of the series, but I think I picked a pretty good place to start. Warshawski's tightly-constructed plots and great characters make for a fast-paced read, and her social commentary is sharp while never interfering with the flow of the story. I will definitely keep more Paretsky on my "to-read" list.
What do You think about Fire Sale (2006)?
For some books, I can remember exactly how and when I first became aware of an author. I can vividly remember getting on a plane in Boston, wandering around the bookshop in the airport looking for a read, and buying my first Robert Parker Spencer novel and devouring it on the plane. So then of course every time I went to the library, I had to see what new books Parker had written. And there, near the Parker books at the libraty, there I found Sara Paretsky.This was at about the time I started reading Sue Grafton and Marcia Muller books. It seemed like women mystery writers were really coming into their own, and I was trying to read them all. Sue and Marcia are prolific writers, but Sara is not at all. (I think she has health problems which affect her productivity.) But when I am roaming the shelves at the library, I like to check out her section (I no longer read Parker....) and see if there is anything new.Last visit I hit pay dirt. A Paretsky novel that I had not read! I took it home....and had a hard time reading it. For anyone else, I probably would have put it down. V.I, our heroine, is so....prickly. She rubs people the wrong way--constantly--and I begin to be annoyed with her at time. But I continued to slog through it until it was no longer a slog, it was a page turner. This mystery series tends to have very complex plots, and this book was no exception. People are entangled and incidents are connected and she just keeps tugging at threads until she is able to unravel the puzzle. Still annoying, but engrossing, and I look forward to the next novel Sara gives us.
—Marni
The last time I read a Sara Paretsky (Check out Paretsky’s Tunnel Vision, 5/5/08 if you care.) she sent her favorite character, V.I. Warshawski, into Chicago’s long-forgotten subterranean depths to rescue a mom and her children. Nothing quite so bizarre in Fire Sale, and it’s a good thing because neither that situation nor her interactions with the main antagonist were particularly believable. The schtick that time was spousal abuse and society’s neglect of the victims. This time, the issue is corporate abuse of the poor and defenseless. Warshwski is called in to sub as girls basketball coach at her old high school on the South Side. When she seeks some industrial money for uniforms, etc., she stumbles on a nefarious scheme that involves not only the corporation itself, but the families of several of her players. There’s a wrong-side-of-the-tracks romance, some interesting Spanish, and some heartrending looks inside the world of poverty and miseducation. As I write, I realize that Paretsky has a bit more of a social message than I thought she did. All that and mindless entertainment too. Nice package.FIRE SALE--V.I.’S AT IT AGAINThursday, July 17, 2008
—Carl Brush
Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski. No wonder she goes by V.I.!This is my first Warshawski. I expect there to be more because I have several more books bought simultaneously at a used book store – like new – and I damn well am going to read them since I’ve already paid for them! A good family friend told me about this spunky woman. V.I. is vying to be one of my new strong woman protagonists.I still have the couple of new George Pelecanos books to read but it is his macho males that I am trying to escape. I have enjoyed his books for quite a few years and have managed to read them all except the two most recent ones that sit on my shelf waiting their turn. I am ready for the women in my mystery reading to be stronger and in more central roles. I am not looking for women with male macho characteristics. I am looking for women who reject being labeled “girl” and who refuse the role of sex object. And, today, that search has led me to Sara Paretsky.If Wal-Mart is no friend of yours, you will appreciate their thinly disguised presence under the pseudonym By-Smart. They are in the camp of the bad guys. If you know something about South Side Chicago, this book will get some extra points. And the social issue in this book: poverty; big time, won’t quit, killer poverty. At the same time, and this was less to my interest or liking, we saw the other end of the spectrum: Life of the Rich and Famous, in the parlance of the day, the 1%. The extremely rich who serve weak coffee to Ms. Warshawski. For shame.I found a lot to like about Fire Sale but I had very high expectations so was not satisfied with the total reading experience. I am giving it three stars (although it had a four star ending) and planning to check out more Paretsky books hoping to see more of the strong side of Private Investigator Warshawski. In the meantime, I also have Sue Grafton and Marcia Muller and Linda Barnes on my list to check out. If you have an additional suggestion of a woman mystery author who has created a strong woman protagonist, I would love to hear from you.
—Larry Bassett
