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This page lists novels, short story collections, non-fiction and books edited by Sara Paretsky.

Some of the novels listed have been published a number of times. The cover images shown are, where possible, the first US edition and a recent mass market paperback edition.

Written by Sara Paretsky:
- novels / short story collections
- non-fiction

About Sara Paretsky:
- biographical / critical

Edited by Sara Paretsky:
- short story collections

Indemnity Only

Sara Paretsky

1982

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"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 the life of someone she has never met, it becomes clear that she is in danger of losing her own."

Deadlock

Sara Paretsky

1984

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"Boom Boom's body was found floating near the docks, chewed up and spat out by a ship's propeller. More like brother and sister than cousins, Vic and Boom Boom looked out for each other. Boom Boom grew up to be an ice hockey hero, and Vic a private eye. And now V.I. Warshawski would like to know how, exactly, her cousin died."

Killing Orders

Sara Paretsky

1985

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"Years ago V.I. Warshawski's Aunt Rosa treated the detective's beloved mother in an unforgiveable way. Now, after she's accused of stealing $3 million from the Dominican priory where she works, Rosa calls upon the ties of blood to clear her name. V.I. is not prepared to forgive so easily. Until suddenly no one else - the FBI, a threatening phone caller, and even Aunt Rosa herself - appears to want her on the case either. V.I. turns to an old friend for help. But the stakes are higher than she could have realised."

Bitter Medicine

Sara Paretsky

1987

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"Consuelo is sixteen, heavily pregnant and married to an unemployed gangster. The last thing she needs is a negligent doctor. When she is rushed into the Friendship private hospital, the staff are reluctant to treat her. Fortunately she has Vic Warshawski, family friend and ex-lawyer, with her. But Consuelo and her baby are the tragic victims of a system so corrupt that it pays her husband to keep quiet. Anyone who can discover anything about the unorthodox dealings of the Friendship is in danger. And Vic's investigations are just about to begin."

Blood Shot

Sara Paretsky

1988

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"When V.I. Warshawski is asked to search for the father of a childhood friend, she assumes it'll be a straightforward case. But the return to her old Chicago neighbourhood reignites dark memories from her past - memories she'd sooner forget. As the body of another old friend suddenly turns up, V.I. finds herself embroiled in a dangerous quest for justice which pits her against the bosses of big business and industrial corruption. It's one of her toughest and most personal cases yet, one from which she may not emerge entirely unscathed."

Burn Marks

Sara Paretsky

1990

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"When her seedy and importunate Aunt Elena turns up on her doorstep at midnight, having been burned out of her old people's home, V.I. Warshawski is exasperated rather than curious. Her interest is aroused only when an old friend, now a rising politician, puts pressure on her not to investigate ... and what she discovers isn't pretty: massive corruption and collusion among Chicago politicians and the construction industry. In the complex threads of past loyalties and big aspirations, the political stakes are high and friendship is cheap."

Guardian Angel

Sara Paretsky

1992

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"V.I. Warshawski's Chicago neighbourhood is prospering. As it's out with the old and in with the new, long-term residents like elderly Hattie Frizell find themselves viciously under threat . . . But that's not all that's troubling V.I. When the body of her neighbour's friend is found washed up in the Sanitary Canal, her investigations lead her to uncover a world of corporate conspiracy and political corruption involving some of Chicago's most prestigious industrial players. And after several attempts on her life, it seems that this time, V.I. may have dug too deep."

Tunnel Vision

Sara Paretsky

1994

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"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 of Chicago, as well as into the abandoned tunnels beneath the city streets - where more dark secrets have been buried."

Windy City Blues

Sara Paretsky

1995

V.I. Warshawski short stories

"It's strictly Friends & Family as V.I. Warshawski makes return appearances in a collection of stories that bring new meaning to 'ties that bind.' Decked out in her silk shirts and no-nonsense Attitude, V.I. is out to make a living--by the skin of her teeth. In Grace Notes, V I has barely finished her morning coffee when she sees an ad in the paper asking for information abut her own mother, long dead. The paper leads V I to her newfound Italian cousin Vico, who’s looking for music composed by their great-grandmother. What’s the score? Clearly it’s something to kill for…. The Pietro Andromache find V I’s friend Dr. Lotty Herschel with motive and means to dispatch her professional rival and steal his priceless statue. Lotty didn’t do it—but does she know who did? V I soon cuts to the art of the case—and it’s not a pretty picture at all! In Strung Out, love means nothing and V I’s quick to learn the score as her old friend’s tennis-champion daughter is under suspicion for strangling her father with a racket string. And there’s more, nine stories in all, in this masterful collection of short fiction starring V I Warshawski"

Ghost Country

Sara Paretsky

1998

"The gritty adventures of V I Warshawski have made the Chicago PI a marquee name among today’s sleuths and turned her creator, Sara Paretsky, into one of the mystery world’s most popular authors. So it’s rather surprising that Paretsky risks her commercial success with a new book that veers sharply from the sure-bet Warshawski series. But Paretsky’s latest may be her best book yet; it shows amazing depth and emotion, offers richly complex characters and a stunningly original plot, and provides subtle but caustic commentary on today’s social problems."

Hard Time

Sara Paretsky

1999

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"While driving home after celebrating friend Murray Ryerson's big break into TV hosting, V.I. almost collides with a fatally wounded woman lying in the street. The deceased is Nicola Aguinaldo, former employee of security giant B.B. Baladine and recent prison runaway. Taking on the case, V.I. finds herself plunged into a sinister network of corruption that pits her against the police, the prison and the entertainment industry - with potentially lethal results."

Total Recall

Sara Paretsky

2001

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"When V.I.'s close friend Lotty Herschel is approached by a man claiming to be a fellow Holocaust survivor, she's forced to recall a painful past she's tried desperately to forget. Coming to Lotty's aid, V.I. decides to investigate the mysterious stranger. But her findings lead to the exposure of something much darker involving an international conspiracy reaching all the way back to Nazi Europe - as well as a shocking truth which could potentially devastate her friend."

V.I. x 2

Sara Paretsky

2002

Comprises two V.I. Warshawski short stories: Photo finish and Publicity stunts.

Blacklist

Sara Paretsky

2003

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"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 secrets to light."

Fire Sale

Sara Paretsky

2005

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"A dangerous, depressed place reeking of bad memories, South Chicago is a neighbourhood private investigator V.I. Warshawski left a long time ago. But now she's back, drawn to the streets of her childhood once again to do a favour for a friend. It was never going to be easy - and when the mother of a local girl asks her to look into claims of sabotage at the factory where she works, V.I. quickly finds herself caught up in something far more sinister."

Bleeding Kansas

Sara Paretsky

2008

"The Grelliers and the Schapens are two families who have been farming in the Kaw River Valley for over a hundred and fifty years, their lives connected through the generations by history and geography. Gina Haring, bringing with her the liberal air of the big city, moves into a dilapidated house near both families' properties. Gina has secrets, her own reasons for being in the Kansas countryside, and they're not necessarily what the people around her imagine. Susan's involvement with her stirs up the wrath of the Schapen clan - and has cataclysmic results for her own family."

Hardball

Sara Paretsky

2009

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"When V.I. Warshawski is asked to find a man who's been missing for four decades, a search that she thought would be futile turns lethal. Old skeletons from the city's racially charged history rise up to force her back with a vengeance - 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. The elderly sisters who hired her are also keeping important information to themselves. Then V.I. finds that her family is keeping secrets of their own. A young cousin whom she's never met arrives from Kansas City to work on a political campaign, but disappears under mysterious circumstances. Afraid to learn that her adored father might have been a bent cop, deception and corruption following her at every step, V.I. finds all her certainties under threat, but takes the investigation all the way to its frightening end."

Body Work

Sara Paretsky

2010

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"Doctors take days off - why not PIs? V.I. Warshawski demands. But when the hardest-working of private eyes goes out one night, a stranger is shot and dies in her arms. V.I. has been visiting Club Gouge, Chicago's edgiest night spot, where a woman known as the Body Artist turns her naked body into a canvas for the audience to paint on. The show attracts all kinds of people, from a menacing off-duty cop to Ukrainian mobsters and Iraq war veterans - and V.I.'s impetuous cousin, Petra. A tormented young painter shows up too, and the intricate designs she creates on the Body Artist drive one of the soldiers into a violent rage. When the painter is shot, the police think it's a clear-cut case: a shell-shocked war veteran goes off the rails. But the soldier's family hires V.I. to clear his name, and the detective uncovers a chain of ugly truths that stretches all the way from Iraq to Chicago's South Side."

Photo Finish

Sara Paretsky

2011

A V.I. Warshawski short story. Published electronically. Originally published in a magazine and as a bonus in the first edition of Body Work.

"When a beautiful young man hires Chicago detective V.I. Warshawski to find his long-lost father, his story has so many holes that V.I. knows she’s on thin ice. Some illusive resemblance to a face she can’t quite remember keeps the PI on the case, even though when she finds the old man, he claims he never had a child. Uncovering the real identities of both father and son leads V.I. on a chase from Chicago’s seedy bars to its Gold Coast hotels and leave her shaken to the core."

V.I. x 3

Sara Paretsky

2011

Comprises three V.I. Warshawski short stories: Photo finish, Publicity Stunts and A Family Sunday In The Park. All stories had previously been published in magazines.

Breakdown

Sara Paretsky

2012

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"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 Illinois Democratic candidate for Senate. For V.I. Warshawski, the questions multiply faster than the answers. Is the killing linked to a hostile media campaign against Sophy Durango? Or to Chaim Salanter's childhood in Nazi-occupied Lithuania? As V.I. struggles for answers, she finds herself fighting enemies who are all too human."

Critical Mass

Sara Paretsky

2013

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"Private Eye V.I. Warshawski is roused one morning by an SOS from a woman on a farm south of Chicago. When V.I. gets there, she finds no woman - but a dead man in a cornfield, his body savagely mutilated. V.I. is happy to leave the case to the local sheriff: it looks like a falling out among meth dealers. But back in Chicago, she learns that the missing woman is a protégée of her oldest friend and confidante, Dr Lotty Herschel, and is compelled to investigate. What V.I. uncovers pulls her into a world of nuclear secrets and high-stakes computing, with roots reaching back to the Second World War. The detective soon finds herself in a hall of mirrors where she can't tell reality from video games, and her life is on the line. For V.I., this is her most profound, and terrifying, adventure yet."

Brush Back

Sara Paretsky

2015

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"For six stormy weeks in high school, V.I. Warshawski thought she was in love with Frank Guzzo. He broke up with her, she went off to college, he started driving trucks for a living. She forgot about him until the day his mother was arrested for bludgeoning his kid sister Annie to death. Twenty-five years later, Stella is released and Frank comes to V. I., begging the private detective to help find grounds to exonerate his mother from a crime she claims she never committed. V.I. doesn't want to get involved, but life has been hard on Frank. When V.I. agrees to ask a few questions, it's a painful journey to the past for her, to her old neighbourhood and the people she grew up with. And when she gets beaten up after attending a youth-group meeting in her old 'hood, V.I.'s main question becomes whether she will live long enough to find the answers."

Taste Of Life

Sara Paretsky

2016

Published electronically. Originally published as a bonus in the first edition of Brush Back.

"Daphne Raydor has an insatiable appetite. Overweight as she is, she always assumed she would never know love. But meeting Jerry changes everything. Her appetite decreases. Her self-worth skyrockets. Then her mother comes to visit. And everything changes again. But Daphne refuses to go back to her old life, and now her appetite is for revenge."

Fallout

Sara Paretsky

2017

A V.I. Warshawski novel

"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 missile site next door to the farm? What happened at the site in 1983, when students tried to stage their own version of Greenham Common? Everywhere V.I. turns she seems to be finding more trouble - with not a sign of August and Emerald. And then trouble turns to death."

Wildcat

Sara Paretsky

2017

A V.I. Warshawski short story. Published electronically.

"V.I. Warshawski developed her strength and sense of justice at a very early age. It’s 1966 and on the south side of Chicago racial tensions are at an all-time high. Dr. Martin Luther King is leading marches at Marquette Park and many in the neighborhood are very angry. With nothing but a bicycle, eighty-two cents in her pocket, and her Brownie camera hanging from her wrist, Victoria sneaks off to Marquette Park alone to protect her father Tony, a police officer who is patrolling the crowds. What begins as a small adventure and a quest to find her father and make sure he is safe turns into something far more dangerous. As the day goes on and the conflict at the park reaches a fever pitch Victoria realizes she must use her courage and ingenuity if she wants to keep herself and her family members out of harm’s way."

Writing in an Age of Silence

Sara Paretsky

2007

" In this powerful new book, Sara Paretsky explores the traditions of political and literary dissent that have informed her life and work, against the unparallelled repression of free speech and thought in the USA today. In tracing the writer's difficult journey from silence to speech, she turns to her childhood and youth in rural Kansas, and brilliantly evokes Chicago - the city with which she has become indelibly associated - from her arrival during the civil-rights struggle in the mid-1960s to her most extraordinary literary creation, the south-side detective V. I. Warshawski. Paretsky traces the emergence of V. I. Warshawski from the shadows of the loner detectives that stalk the mean streets of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler's novels, and in the process explores American individualism, the failure of the American dream and the resulting dystopia. Both memoir and meditation, Writing in an Age of Silence is a compelling exploration of the writer's art and daunting responsibility in the face of the assault on US civil liberties post-9/11."

In the Shadow of the Master

Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

Editor: Michael Connelly

2009

Includes a chapter by Sara Paretsky called Imagining Edgar Allen Poe.

"In the Shadow of the Master is an exceptional collection of classic stories from the lord of literary darkness himself—the inimitable Edgar Allan Poe—accompanied by enthralling essays from twenty of his bestselling acolytes and admirers. With appreciations by Michael Connelly, Stephen King, Lisa Scottoline, Tess Gerritsen, Laura Lippman, Nelson DeMille, Lawrence Block, and thirteen others, In the Shadow of the Master is a must-have for thriller and mystery fans of all ages."

Words, Works, and Ways of Knowing: The Breakdown of Moral Philosophy in New England Before the Civil War

Sara Paretsky

2016

"Before Paretsky began her writing career, she earned a PhD in history from the University of Chicago with a dissertation on moral philosophy and religion in New England in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Now, for the first time, fans of Paretsky can read that earliest work, Words, Works, and Ways of Knowing. Paretsky here analyzes attempts by theologians at Andover Seminary, near Boston, to square and secure Calvinist religious beliefs with emerging knowledge from history and the sciences. She carefully shows how the open-minded scholasticism of these theologians paradoxically led to the weakening of their intellectual credibility as conventional religious belief structures became discredited, and how this failure then incited reactionary forces within Calvinism. That conflict between science and religion in the American past is of interest on its face, but it also sheds light on contemporary intellectual battles."

New Hard-Boiled Writers: 1970s-1990s

Leroy Lad Panek

2000

"Beginning in the 1970s, a new generation of writers took over the hard-boiled story and transformed it to fit the realities of their world - a universe infected by violence, greed, racism, sexism, war, and commercialism. The author comments both on the way the hard-boiled story has changed over the past three decades and examines the work of ten significant contemporary hard-boiled writers. Chapters on Robert B. Parker, James Crumley, Loren Estleman, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Carl Hiaasen, Earl Emerson, Robert Crais, James Lee Burke, and Walter Mosley demonstrate how these writers have used the hard-boiled hero to make powerful statements about life in the last quarter of the twentieth century."

Sara Paretsky: Detective Fiction as Trauma Literature

Cynthia S. Hamilton

2015

"Sara Paretsky is known for her influential V.I. Warshawski series, which transformed the masculine hard-boiled detective formula into a vehicle for feminist values. But Paretsky does more than this. Her novels also illustrate the extent to which detective fiction acts as a literature of trauma, allowing Paretsky to address the politics of agency in ways that go beyond the personal, for trauma always has a social and a political dimension. Paretsky's work also exploits the way detective fiction mirrors the writing of history. Here, Paretsky uses the form to expose the partiality of historical accounts - whether they be personal, institutional, or national - that authorise 'forgetting' of a particularly insidious kind. Significantly, all these issues are explored within the framework of the traditional hard-boiled detective novel."

Out of Deadlock: Female Emancipation in Sara Paretsky s V.I. Warshawski Novels, and her Influence on Contemporary Crime Fiction

Editor: Enrico Minardi and Jennifer Byron

2015

"Sara Paretsky is a world-renowned author, highly regarded for her V.I. Warshawski series, which has revolutionized the conventions of the crime fiction genre by presenting a feminist perspective. The notion that crime fiction is merely a popular genre meant for pure entertainment has particularly been reconsidered, as Paretsky s novels serve a pedagogical purpose in capturing the reader s awareness of different social concerns. It has become evident that various female authors of crime fiction, worldwide, are adopting a similar stance in order to point out disparities and adversities within their own particular socio-cultural context. This collection of academic essays explores the influence that the work of Paretsky has had on various authors throughout the world, given the precedent she set for such a notable shift in the genre of crime fiction."

Sara Paretsky: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction

Margaret Kinsman

McFarland and Co

2016

"This book is the first comprehensive reference work on Paretsky, providing an overview of the Warshawski novels and short stories, her other novels, a volume of collected essays, her anthologies and journalism. Special attention is paid to the character of Warshawski-the tough, street-smart detective who challenges stereotypical representations of women in crime fiction-and to the significance of the Chicago setting she inhabits. Paretsky's pioneering work beyond the page is covered. A guide to the scholarly and critical debates is included, along with discussion of media adaptations and references to key websites."

Beastly Tales: The Mystery Writers of America Anthology

Editor: Sara Paretsky

1989

"Presents a collection of fifteen chilling stories, in each of which an animal figures prominently, by a group of already regarded and newly discovered authors, including Isaac Asimov, James Holding, Margaret Maron, and Donald E. Westlake."

A Woman's Eye

Editor: Sara Paretsky

1991

"Crime is common ground for the twenty-one women writers in this extraordinary collection of contemporary mystery fiction. The voices here include professional crime solvers who take you from the mean streets of V.I. Warshawski's Chicago in a case of music and murder... to the California freeway where Kinsey Millhone's beloved VW skids into a shooting... to the gang-held turf of Sharon says mum's the word. And then there are mothers, grandmothers, battered wives, and social workers -- ordinary women in extraordinary situations whose voices reveal contemporary life as seen through a woman's eye. From the opening tale of a girl down-and-out in London and what she steals from a corpse... to the final story of a summer vacation in the Berkshires, complete with romance and sudden death... this unique collection brings us great mystery writing that engages both our intellects and our hearts."

• Lucky Dip (Liza Cody)
• Full Circle (Sue Grafton)
• Benny's Space (Marcia Muller)
• The Puppet (Dorothy Salisbury Davis)
• The Scar (Nancy Pickard)
• Murder Without a Text (Amanda Cross)
• Discards (Faye Kellerman)
• Getting to Know You (Antonio Fraser)
• A Match Made in Hell (Julie Smith)
• Theft of the Poet (Barbara Wilson)
• Death and Diamonds (Susan Dunlap)
• Kill the Man for Me (Mary Wings)
• The Cutting Edge (Marilyn Wallace)
• Looking for Thelma (Gillian Slowo)
• Deborah's Judgment (Margaret Maron)
• A Man's Home (Shelley Singer)
• Her Good Name (Carolyn G. Hart)
• Ghost Station (Carolyn Wheat)
• Where Are You, Monica? (Maria Antonia Oliver)
• Settled Score (Sara Paretsky)
• That Summer at Quichiquois (Dorothy B. Hughes)

Women on the Case

Editor: Sara Paretsky

1996

"Sara Paretsky, creator of V.I. Warshawski, has brought together a brilliant and diverse collection of short stories which proves the old adage that a woman's work is never done. From private eye purgatory to tourist's paradise, from the mean streets of despair to gilded hell in consumer heaven, the cream of contemporary women crime writers presents stories of crime and punishment on a global scale. The writers are: Helga Anderle; Linda Barnes; Nevada Barr; Amel Benaboura; Pieke Biermann; Eleanor Taylor Bland; P.M. Carlson; Liza Cody; Amanda Cross; Doroty Salisbury Davis; Susan Dunlop; Antonia Fraser; Frances Fyfield; Susan Geason; Elizabeth George; Linda Grant; Dicey Scroggins Jackson; Myriam Laurini; Lia Matera; Marcia Muller; Irina Muravyova; Sara Paretsky; Nancy Pickard; Ruth Rendell; Andrea Smith; and Barbara Wilson."

Sisters on the Case

Editor: Sara Paretsky

2007

"Featuring contributions from some of today's best-known women mystery writers including Sue Henry, Barbara D'Amato, Carolyn Hart, and Sara Paretsky, this thrilling collection is filled with fear, murder, suspense, and revenge."