Sara Paretsky Collection: Bitter Medicine, Total Recall, and Blacklist

by Sara Paretsky, Sandra Burr (Read by)

Bitter Medicine (Director: Ruth Bloomquist; Engineer: Melissa Coates): Chicago private eye V. I. Warshawski knows from the start that Consuelo Alvarado's baby is trouble. Consuelo is sixteen. Diabetic. And the daughter of a friend. When she goes into labor too early, even V. I.'s wild drive to get her to the hospital can't save either Consuelo or her child. Soon V. I. is investigating possible malpractice at the emergency room - and falling for a doctor who works there. Total Recall (Director: Laural Merlington; Engineer: Melissa Coates): In Total Recall, Sara Paretsky brings together several disparate plots in one gripping story. This powerfully suspenseful novel confronts the machinations of a vast and corrupt industry that trades on the victims of Nazi terrorism; the strange and dubious phenomenon of "recovered memory;" and a personal story that brings V. I. Warshawski into the long-buried past of her dearest friend and mentor, Dr. Lotty Herschel. Blacklist (Director: Laural Merlington; Engineer: Melissa Coates): Eager for something physical to do in the spirit-exhausting wake of 9/11, V. I. accepts a request from an old client to check up on an empty family mansion; subsequently surprises an intruder in the dark; and, giving chase, topples into a pond. Grasping for something to hold on to, her fingers close around a lifeless human hand. It is the body of a reporter who had been investigating events of forty-five years earlier, and V. I.'s discovery quickly sucks her into the history of two great Chicago families - their fortunes intertwined by blood, sex, money, and the scandals that may or may not have resulted in murder all these years later.

Audio Cassette

Published April 25, 2005

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

[Jane]

Total Recall one of the best ones yet. I can't find Blacklist yet.