Sara Paretsky

Blacklist: A V.I. Warshawski Novel

Sara Paretsky

• 2004 Gold Dagger
• Score: 10.54

Blacklist is a story of secrets and betrayals that stretch across four generations, but with particular resonance for today.

The secrets are many—political, social, sexual, and financial—and they all have the power to kill, as V.I. soon learns. Eager for physical action in the spirit-numbing wake of 9/11. V.I. is glad to take on a routine stake-out for her most important client, Darraugh Graham. His ninety-one-year-old mother sold the family estate when she could no longer manage it, and now that it’s standing empty, Geraldine Graham keeps a fretful…

Toxic Shock: A V.I. Warshawski Novel

Sara Paretsky

• 1988 Silver Dagger
• Score: 8.38

Writing in an Age of Silence

Sara Paretsky

• 2007 NBCC–Autobiography finalist
• Score: 6.57

In this powerful new book, Sara Paretsky explores the traditions of political and literary dissent that have informed her life and work, against the unparalleled 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’s 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.