Indemnity Only / Blood Shot / Burn Marks

by Sara Paretsky

Stubborn V. I. Warshawski is up to her private eyeballs in trouble with the local thugs and white-collar criminals of south Chicago in three works by Paretsky including Indemnity Only, Blood Shot, and Burn Marks.

Genres: Mystery

646 pages, Hardcover

First published September 12, 1995

About the author

Sara Paretsky is a modern American author of detective fiction. Paretsky was raised in Kansas, and graduated from the state university with a degree in political science. She did community service work on the south side of Chicago in 1966 and returned in 1968 to work there. She ultimately completed a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago, entitled The Breakdown of Moral Philosophy in New England Before the Civil War, and finally earned an MBA from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Married to a professor of physics at the University of Chicago, she has lived in Chicago since 1968.

The protagonist of all but two of Paretsky's novels is V.I. Warshawski, a female private investigator. Warshawski's eclectic personality defies easy categorization. She drinks Johnnie Walker Black Label, breaks into houses looking for clues, and can hold her own in a street fight, but also she pays attention to her clothes, sings opera along with the radio, and enjoys her sex life.

Paretsky is credited with transforming the role and image of women in the crime novel. The Winter 2007 issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection is devoted to her work.

Her two books that are non-Warshawski novels are : Ghost Country (1998) and Bleeding Kansas (2008).

Reviews

[Mary McCarthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paretsky has always been a favorite. I came upon INDENITY ONLY as a 30th anniversary edition. It was published originally in 1982; I think it was her first outing for the V I character, although the quality of the plotting and the writing certainly didn't reflect that it was an early try.
Although I love the V I saga, perhaps my most favorite book was BLEEDING KANSAS, a 2009 novel that featured farm families still caught up in conflict that had dated to the abolitionist vs slavery times of the 1800's. For me, it was the first Paretsky's story that wasn't set in Chicago with a certain Polish-Italian PI that most people called Vic.
I plan to continue to revisit the Paretsky books I've read in the past. Some I may have read too quickly, like a child with fresh cookies. Others I simply want to appreciate again.

[Amy Sheldon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty entertaining - good job of building the tension, etc. etc. But something about the characters were annoying - sometimes I couldn't figure out why they were doing what they were doing.

And a little bit too much like the Sue Grafton books. Could have been a clone.