Hardball

I'm a little leery of starting a book in a long-standing series with the latest volume, but I'd heard good things about this latest V. I. Varshawski novel by Sara Paretsky that I took a chance. For the most part I was pleased, but it does have some of the pitfalls of the series detective.

To be honest, I may have read a Warshawski novel before, but I can't remember. She's a tough Chicago P.I., and like many in the giant mystery landscape she's fueled mostly by a chip on her shoulder. I tend to like my private eyes dissolute and cynical, but Warshawski gets by largely on indignation--her greatest flaw is her temper, which usually results in nasty quips.

Hardball deals with a crime committed over forty years ago. Warshawski is asked by a nun to help two elderly black sisters find out what happened to the son of one of them. He went missing in 1966, and Warshawski's digging into a very cold case leads back to the race riots around the visit of Martin Luther King Jr. to the Windy City (King said that Chicago could teach Mississippi how to hate). Warshawski, whose actions are complicated by her idealistic young cousin, who is working on a senate campaign, uncovers police corruption, which pains her because her own deceased father was involved in the arrest of possibly the wrong man for a murder back in '66. A lot of it hinges on an old baseball, signed by former White Sox star Nellie Fox.

Some of this is difficult sledding in the first half of the book. Warshawski, who narrates, is not exactly someone I want to spend a lot of time with. As with many fictional private eyes, she flouts the law and does things that defy sense, while at other times makes leaps of logic that no one could anticipate. Frankly, she can be a bit of a pill, and isn't very charming. But Paretsky also does a great job of giving the reader a sense of Chicago. I'm not up on the geography of the city, but it felt completely authentic to me, from visits to the old stockyards to the former Polish neighborhoods that are now Hispanic or African American (she and her cousin visit the house where she used to live and cautions that they should be careful leaving the car).

The ending builds nicely to an exciting conclusion, and the reminder of the civil rights struggle is never a bad thing, as there is still a lot of work to be done.