Bitter Medicine

V.I. Warshawski #4

by Sara Paretsky

Private eye V.I. Warshawski finds herself up against rampant corruption in Chicago’s hospitals in the fourth novel in Sara Paretsky’s New York Times bestselling series.Young, diabetic, and pregnant, Consuelo Alvarado is lucky to have a mentor in V.I. Warshawski. But not even V.I. can help when Consuelo goes into premature labor in a remote suburb; mother and baby both die in the nearby hospital. When a young resident starts raising questions about Consuelo’s treatment, what seemed like a tragic accident turns into something far more disturbing. What connection could the hospital have with Chicago’s street gangs? What heavy secret is the hospital’s neonatologist carrying? The questions the detective asks cut to the heart of everything that is troubling about the practice of medicine in America. Can V.I. sort out the answers before she herself ends up in the hospital morgue?

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Crime, Mystery Thriller, Thriller, Detective, Audiobook

375 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 1987

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).