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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780451218995
ISBN number: 045121899X
Label: Signet
Manufacturer: Signet
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 544
Printing Date: July 05, 2006
Publishing house: Signet
Sale Popularity Level: 199255
Studio: Signet
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A nagging conscience makes V.I. Warshawski agree to fill in as coach for the girls' basketball team at her South Side alma mater-which in turn leads her to the headquarters of By-Smart, the global retail empire where V.I. hopes to get some desperately needed funds for the struggling squad. But conscience seems to be in short supply at By-Smart...with the exception of Billy Bysen. He's the earnest teenage grandson of the chain's gruff, tight-fisted founder. And when Billy disappears-along with a mysterious document much desired by By-Smart's management team-V.I. is hurled onto a twisted, body-strewn path that runs through Chicago's dirtiest places, and reveals some of its dirtiest secrets.
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Rated by buyers 
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If you would like to read a novel in which the illegal aliens are the warm, honorable, compassionate characters and the Americans are the cold, crooked, conniving characters, then this is the one for you. As for myself, I have had quite enough of the NYTimes/WashingtonPost agenda of promoting the wonderfulness of the illegal alien invaders. I guess I'll try a different author for future reads.
Rated by buyers 
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I've read all twelve of Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski novels over the years. I don't read too many mysteries or detective stories, but I've consistently sought these out: Paretsky's a top notch writer, giving us a memorable cast of recurring characters and a sympathetic, tough-but-vulnerable protagonist in V.I.
Her previous outing, Blacklist, was a disappointment. Pacing was slow, and the plot felt secondary to political points that the author wanted to make. I'm happy to say that with Fire Sale, Paretsky has given us a much better read.
BySmart, really a stand-in for Wal*Mart, is a huge chain of stores, run by the Bysen family. The Bysens are used to getting their way. They do not renegotiate with their suppliers. They have a great deal of money -- thus a great deal of power. One of their suppliers is a flag manufacturing plant in Warskawski's home turf of South Chicago. An explosion that destroys the plant puts them out of business and means one less employer for South Chicago residents. It also draws suspicion and sets Warshawski on the path of an investigation that includes a missing Bysen family member, a runaway teen from the local high school, and a recording device that might tell the whole story -- if only it could be found!
Paretsky hasn't abandoned making points about social and political issues here, which is fine. However, we're introduced to a few too many stereotypically drawn South Chicago residents, battling the demons of unemployment, poverty, and teenage pregnancy. These characters feel a little bit two-dimensional. Still, unlike Blacklist, Fire Sale is still a page-turner: just what you want from a good Warshawski outing!
Rated by buyers 
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Sarah Paretsky started out as an amateur with a good premise: a real believable hard-boiled woman character. Her very first books were entertaining, despite her obvious limitations as a writer. She no longer is an amateur and I no longer have patience with her incredibly awkward writing, her relentless inclusion of information that a talented high school-aged writer would know to edit out, lame dialogue and cardboard-cutout characters. After a dozen novels in what appears to be a very successful career, it is incumbent upon her to either try to learn more about her craft, or at least get an editor who can clean up her books for her. The mystery field has a lot of very talented women writers - Lindsey Davis, Donna Leon, Ellis Peters, Margaret Lawrence, Jamie Harrison, Martha Grimes, and on and on. Readers should demand better from their favorite authors than someone like Paretsky gets away with.
Rated by buyers 
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It's been a while since I got a mystery to read, but I was in one of those moods where I just cannot bare to read anything that I need to be able to remember or make sense of for teaching, or writing. I just looked quickly at the books available in the local pharmacy, and there was a Paretsky that I had managed to miss. As I've read most of her other ones, I thought I could take a chance. Some of the newer writers tend to go into areas that disturb me, or their language bothers me, but there are a few authors I feel comfortable with reading for 'light' material. Some people complain that Paretsky writes with an ulterior motive. Most of her material has stuff built into the plot to make a statement about something important to her. That's okay. I may not always agree with what she says, but then if I really wanted to read something asinine I would read a romance. I don't read those things because of exactly that reason.
Anyway, her plot in this book was much better than the last one was, though as per usual, she uses her novels to take pot-shots at what is currently bothering her. In this case, it must be corporate America as well as the current administration, plus current steps backwards that have been made in equal rights for women and other minorities in jobs and health care. Since I agree with her on this stuff, I have no problem reading a book with a decent plot utilizing this. It comes out a little preachy, a little heavy-handed...there was actually too much information in this book to make a good statement about any one problem. The plot deals with American corporations not paying decent wages, and paying unequal ones with an eye towards holding down health care costs by saying especially women cannot hold jobs that make a full 40 hour week. I guess they would have a problem if we were French, since they all currently work less than a 35 hour week. No one would be insured.
Paresky returns to South Chicago where she was born and raised to try to help, and ends up turning the place into a busy criminal beehive, with companies resorting to illegal tactics to keep costs down. The names of the entities may have changed, but anyone who reads a newspaper can pretty much determine who she is writing about. There is an awful lot of incongruity built into the plot...I figured out where the kids were prior to the chapters Paresky used to build up to the point. Others would have figured it out and checked with the other coach also.
As with many series, this one is getting old. AFter reading this much about Chicago, and visiting once, I have absolutely no desire to go anywhere near that city again. Makes me glad to live in Pittsburgh...between the attitudes of the cops, the criminals, the weather, etc. there is nothing of interest up there for me. It really seems like a dark place, a dark blot on our national landscape. Makes for great mystery novels, but wouldn't want to live there...
Karen Sadler
Rated by buyers -
When I very first heard of Sara Paretsky, she had only written two books. I used to go to a bookstore, and the owner recommended Paretsky to me as a writer who was similar to Sue Grafton, at least in the sense that both had female protagonists. That store owner told me that men tended to like her books more than women, and so she recommended the author to me. Those two books were quite good, serious, intelligent, straightforward detective novels with the one difference being that the main character is a woman. Since then, the author has built a good reputation as a detective novelist. At the same time, she's also gained chops as a "social critic", which at times is OK, but with Paretsky, it's not. She doesn't know how to do it subtly, and social criticism, if done ham-handedly, is just boring to read and silly.
PLOT SPOILER AHEAD
In the current episode, Paretsky's alter ego, V.I. Warshawski, has been called back to her old neighborhood by her former high school basketball coach. The coach is dying of cancer, can't coach the team anymore, and needs a replacement. Warshawski's reluctant: she runs her own detective agency, and doesn't have time for this, especially when she finds out that there's no pay. But her loyalty to her old coach overcomes that, and she finds herself blowing a whistle and yelling at a dozen girls as they run up and down the court.
The basketball isn't really what the book's about, though. If that were the case, it might have turned out to be a really good book: similar to Robert B. Parker's Spenser novel Early Autumn, which was the one that convinced me Parker was going to be something special. Instead, Paretsky steers the plot to the largest local business, BySmart, an obvious stand-in for Walmart (though that store is mentioned several times). BySmart is run by William Bysen, a World War II veteran, pulled-himself-up -by-his-bootstraps kind of guy, who has a large family who help him run the business. My very first objection to the book is the portrayal of Bysen and his family. I know Paretsky well enough to know that they, or some of them anyway, are going to be the villains of the piece. They are Born Again Christians (of course), incredible hypocrites (goes without saying, doesn't it?), opposed to Unions (you knew that already), and incredibly greedy (why am I telling you this?). It's all written just heavy-handed enough to be silly, without going so far that you could say she was parodying herself. Anyway, Warshawski goes to the local warehouse for the company's stores to try and convince them to donate to her school basketball program, and they predictably have an ineffective, small charity that they've already set up, and trumpet in their TV commercials, so they don't need to give her any money. Then things get complex.
The mother of one of V.I.'s players works in a shop sewing sheets, banners, and flags. Someone's been trying to sabotage the plant, putting dead rats in the air vents of the building, gluing the doors shut with crazy glue, that sort of thing. She asks V.I. to look into it, then mysteriously backs off and insists the investigation is unnecessary, without saying why. V.I. won't buy that explanation, and doggedly continues her investigation (for which she isn't getting paid) without permission, and is watching the factory when it blows sky high, killing the owner.
Meanwhile, there's a separate issue in that another of Warshawski's players collapses on the floor of the court during practice. After a hospital visit and examination we learn she has a genetic heart condition, and can't play ball any more. It turns out her father is an old classmate of V.I.'s, and soon he's helping one of V.I.'s boyfriend Morell's colleagues, as that woman (her name is Marcena) as she tries to learn about "the America Europe doesn't know". She's English, a globe-trotting journalist who drove a tank through Bosnia one time, and Warshawski is predictably jealous of the rapport she has with Morrell, who's recently back from Afghanistan with many bullet holes, recuperating.
You can see there are a lot of plot threads here, and it takes a good long while for Paretsky to let her main character sort through them. This is a 500+ page private eye novel, and it's not tightly plotted like something Greg Iles or James Lee Burke would write, with everything sort of following from one event or incident to another. Here, poor Warshawski runs back and forth trying to keep all the balls in the air, and when the climactic confrontation between our heroine and the villains finally does occur, it's very predictable, and she's telegraphed it for at least half the book. It's also badly contrived, and doesn't really make a lot of sense, and once you discover who the actual killers are, their motivations are absurd, in the extreme, even for spoiled rich kids.
I used to really enjoy Sara Paretsky. I know her politics are different from mine, ... Read More
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