Sara Paretsky weaves the pandemic and its complications into the plot of her 21st V.I. Warshawski thriller, Overboard, due out in May. Chicagoans are emerging from lockdown as everyone is trying to figure out how to stay safe, and private investigator Vic packs masks and hand sanitizer along with her lock picks and Smith & Wesson.
Alerted by her two dogs, Vic finds a teenage girl who seems near
death hiding in the boulders along Lake Michigan. Conscious long enough to
whisper one foreign word to Vic before the rescue squad arrives, the teen later
disappears from the hospital after being interrogated by a policeman and a
janitor who can speak Hungarian.
Vic takes off with her dog Mitch to find the girl again before
she comes to harm. For some reason, the girl is a threat to crooks who will
kill her once she gives them something they value. To complicate the action,
Vic is dealing with another teen, Brad Litvak, who secures her services to
figure out if his father Donny is in danger.
The plot becomes a tangle as Vic discovers Brad’s mother may be
having an affair with one of the villains who is looking for the missing teen,
now identified as Julia Zigler, while the girl’s own uncle Gus Zigler is trying
to steal her inheritance.
A belligerent cop with a history of brutality but no convictions
figures into all this somehow. Vic clashes with him repeatedly as she works
furiously putting all the puzzle pieces together to save Julia and help Brad’s
family, all the while running the rest of her investigator business, which
includes some pro bono work to help some friends save their Temple from vandals
and a city inspector who wants to condemn the building. Seemingly, all these
situations are linked as Vic puts her life on the line to find the connecting
threads.
Sara
Paretsky never disappoints with her multi-layered detective fiction. Kansas
raised, Paretsky has been living in Chicago since 1968. She has a Ph.D. in
history and an MBA from the University of Chicago.
My review will be posted on Goodreads starting March 20,
2022.
I would like to thank St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley
for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.
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