The CIA forced Lily to retire before she was ready. She'd spent forty years as a field agent. She'd been skilled, resourceful, dedicated – everything that makes a good agent, but she'd rubbed too many of her bosses the wrong way. They jumped on a botched op as an excuse to fire her. Now in her seventies, waiting in a doctor's office, she reads a magazine article that startles her out of retirement.The story casts doubt on everything she believed about her first – and happiest – pos...

A witty, wild anthology "filled with excellently plotted stories" of cooking, cleaning, and crime by some household names in mystery fiction ( South Florida Sun Sentinel).Join Nevada Barr, Barbara Collins, Carole Nelson Douglas, Eileen Dreyer, Vicki Hendricks, Suzann Ledbetter, Elisabeth Massie, Christine Matthews, Denise Mina, Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, Nancy Pickard, S.J. Rozan, and Julie Smith on a riotous ride through the dark but often hilarious cor...

On her way home from an all-night surveillance job, V.I. Warshawski's dogs lead her on a mad chase that ends when they find a badly injured teen hiding in the rocks along Lake Michigan. The girl only regains consciousness long enough to utter one enigmatic word. V.I. helps bring her to a hospital, but not long after, she vanishes before anyone can discover her identity.As V.I. attempts to find her, the detective uncovers an ugly consortium of Chicago power brokers and mobsters who ...

During a routine stake-out of a major client's former home, V.I. stumbles upon something she didn't expect to find: a body. The police immediately dismiss the victim as a drunken intruder, but V.I. sees things differently. Hired by the dead man's family to investigate, V.I. is lead back to the blacklists of the McCarthy era as well as into the murky operations of modern American government. Stopping at nothing in her quest for justice, V.I. soon discovers the perilous cost of bringing dark...

The eighth novel in the V.I. Warhawski crime series, set in Chicago, from prize-winning author Sara Paretsky. The discovery of a destitute family in her office basement leads V.I. Warshawski to homeless charity Home Free. But the organisation's frosty reception gives V.I. cause for concern, especially when one of its board members is then found murdered, sprawled across her desk . . . Taking on the case, V.I. uncovers a framework of domestic abuse and fraud which spreads across the whole o...

A SUNDAY TIMES CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH PICK******A V.I. Warshawski novel from the New York Times bestselling author pits acclaimed detective V.I. Warshawski against some of today's most powerful figures.'The 19th Warshawski novel is also a panoramic vision of Chicago at a time when the city is so polarised that decent people don't know who to trust' The Sunday Times

Meeting an anonymous client on a sizzling summer night is asking for trouble. Especially when the client lies and tells V I Warshawski he’s the prominent banker John Thayer, looking for his son’s missing girlfriend. But V I soon discovers the real John Thayer’s son – and he’s dead.As V I begins to question her mysterious client’s motives, she sinks deeper into Chicago’s darker side: a world of gangsters, insurance fraud and contract killings. And while she must concentrate on saving...

V.I. Warshawski's impossible god-daughter Bernie convinces her to look for August, a young film-maker who has disappeared. The evidence indicates that he has gone to Kansas in the company of Emerald, an older black movie actress who wants to film the story of her life. Her search takes V.I. from the military base Emerald was born on, to the farm where she grew up outside a university town, ploughing up past and present-day secrets as she goes.What is happening at the former nuclear...

V I Warshawski may have left her old South Chicago neighborhood, but she learns that she cannot escape it. When V I takes over coaching duties of the girls' basketball team at her former high school, she faces an ill-equipped, ragtag group of gangbangers, fundamentalists, and teenage moms, who inevitably draw the detective into their family woes.Through young Josie Dorrado, V I meets the girl's mother, who voices her worries about sabotage in the little flag manufacturing plant wher...

'Who're you working for then, Warshawski?' 'My cousin.' 'Boom Boom? He's dead.' 'I know. That's why I'm working for him.'Deadlock, V.I. Warshawksi's second case, involves the huge Great Lakes shipping industry. Once again the subject is murder-this time the 'accidental death' of Boom-Boom Warshawski, an ex-hockey star and V.I.'s beloved cousin, who fell-or was pushed-off a rain-slicked pier on Chicago's busy waterfront. Convinced that Boom-Boom was in fact killed because o...

A knock at the door in the middle of the night pulls a Chicago PI into a web of crime and corruption in this "captivating" New York Times bestseller ( The Baltimore Sun ).V.I. "Vic" Warshawski's alcoholic aunt turns up at her door at three in the morning, accompanied by an addict friend after the hotel she's been living in burns down, and Vic is soon on the trail of an arsonist....

Carmilla, Queen of the Night, is a shape-shifting raven whose fictional exploits thrill girls all over the world. When tweens in Chicago's Carmilla Club hold an initiation ritual in an abandoned cemetery, they stumble on an actual corpse, a man stabbed through the heart in a vampire-style slaying. The girls include daughters of some of Chicago's most powerful families: the grandfather of one, Chaim Salanter, is one of the world's wealthiest men; the mother of another, Sophy Durango, is the...