Mysterious Reviews, mysteries reviewed by the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books, is publishing a new review of Hardball by Sara Paretsky. For our blog readers, we are printing it first here in advance of its publication on our website.
Hardball by Sara Paretsky
A V. I. Warshawski Mystery
Putnam (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-399-15593-7 (0399155937)
ISBN-13: 978-0-399-15593-2 (9780399155932)
Publication Date: September 2009
List Price: $26.95
Review: V. I. Warshawski is hired to find a young man who disappeared over 40 years ago in Chicago during a very turbulent time in the city's history in Hardball, the 14th (and final?) mystery in this series by Sara Paretsky.
V. I. is reluctant to take on the case. For starters, there seems to be little financial incentive to do so, and if there's one thing she's learned, it's that pro bono cases don't pay the bills. But take the case she does, agreeing to spend a day or two on it. Lamont Gadsden disappeared in 1966 and was never heard from again. It's probable he's dead, but his mother wants to know for sure, one way or the other, before her sister, who's recently had a stroke, dies. Then V. I.'s investigation takes a personal turn: her cousin, Petra, visiting from Kansas City, disappears. As V. I. says, "it was hard to imagine two people with less in common" yet it seems there's a connection between Petra's current disappearance and that of Lamont 40 years earlier. The case gets even more personal when her dead father, a Chicago cop, and his brother, a former Chicago cop and Petra's father, enter the picture. What links them together? A baseball signed by a White Sox second baseman, but found in the personal effects of V. I.'s father, a die-hard Cubs fan.
It's hard to imagine an author trying to combine a cold case mystery, race relations from the 1960s, the Chicago political machine, and the rivalry between White Sox and Cubs fans into a single book, but Paretsky has done this ... and done it supremely well. The author takes as the foundation of her story a real event: Martin Luther King Jr. visited Marquette Park in a largely white area of southwest Chicago in 1966, at which time a riot broke out with objects being thrown at at King, including a brick that actually hit him. In Hardball, the object at the center of the story is a baseball, which misses King but hits, and kills, a young woman, Harmony Newsome. Her death, and the police investigation that followed, comes to haunt V. I. as she learns who was involved, and how it impacts her current case.
It isn't clear if Hardball is the final chapter in the V. I. Warshawski series, but if so, it's a wonderful way to end. The concept of "closure" is an important plot element here, so it seems appropriate that readers also get closure with V. I. in a memorable, and possibly the best, title in this exceptional series.
Special thanks to Penguin Group for providing an ARC of Hardball for this review.
Review Copyright © 2009 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved
If you are interested in purchasing Hardball from Amazon.com, please click the button to the right. Hardball (Kindle edition) is also available. Learn more about the Kindle, Amazon's Wireless Reading Device.
Synopsis (from the publisher): Chicago's unique brand of ball is sixteen-inch slow pitch, played in leagues all over the city for more than a century. But in politics, in business, and in law enforcement, the game is hardball.
When V. I. Warshawski is asked to find a man who's been missing for four decades, a search that she figured would be futile becomes lethal. Old skeletons from the city's racially charged history, as well as haunting family secrets-her own and those of the elderly sisters who hired her-rise up to brush her back from the plate with a vengeance. A young cousin whom she's never met arrives from Kansas City to work on a political campaign; a nun who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. dies without revealing crucial evidence; and on the city's South Side, people spit when she shows up. Afraid to learn that her adored father might have been a bent cop, V. I. still takes the investigation all the way to its frightening end.
Return to Mystery Books News ...
Thanks very much for your response to Hardball. Maybe it should have been the end of the series, but--V I is soldiering on.
ReplyDelete