Fire Sale

By Sara Paretsky

$25.95 ~ Hardcover ~ Book No. 152792

Going back to South Chicago has always felt to me like a return to death. The people I loved most, those fierce first attachments of childhood, had all died in this abandoned neighborhood on the citys southeast edge. So begins V I Warshawskis newest saga. V I has left her old neighborhood, but she learns here that she cannot escape it. When her high school basketball coach implores her to take over the team at V Is former high school, the detective feels compelled to agree. Her team is a ragtag group of gangbangers, fundamentalists, and teenage moms. The school cannot afford equipment or uniforms, let alone a proper coach. As V I works with them, she inevitably gets drawn into the woes and worries that face their families. One girl in particular, Josie Dorrado, drags V I home so that her mother, Rose Dorrado can pour out her worries about sabotage in the little flag manufacturing plant where she works for thirteen dollars an hour. The biggest employer on the south side, the discount-store behemoth, By-Smart, pays only half that, and Ms. Dorrado doesnt know how shell support her four children if the flag plant shuts down. V I has hardly agreed to look into the sabotage when the plant blows up, injuring the watching V I, but killing the owner. As V I begins to investigate, she finds herself confronting the Bysen family who own the By-Smart company. The founder is old William Buffalo Bill Bysen, now in his eighties. He has four sons who quarrel with each other and with him; the oldest, Young Mr. William, is close to sixty and furious that his father doesnt cede more power to him. Then theres the youngest sons wife, Jacqui, who has over-ridden Buffalo Bills chauvinism to take a role in the company, but who annoys all the brothers because of the money she spends on clothes. And finally, theres Billy the Kid, young Mr. Williams nineteen year old son, whose Christian idealism puts him on a collision course with his father and the company as a whole. When Billy runs away with Josie Dorrado, V I is squeezed between the needs of two very different families. As she tries to find the errant teenagers, and to track down a particularly cruel murderer, her own life is almost forfeit in the swamps that lie under the city of Chicago.