Status Updates From Pay Dirt (V.I. Warshawski #22)

3.5 stars. I’m not sure if I should be happy or sad that VI hasn’t changed a bit over the years.

Pay Dirt is the twenty-second novel I’ve written about my private detective, V.I. Warshawski. When she and I started, I didn’t imagine such a long career for either of us. My goals with my first novel, Indemnity Only, were both simple and grandiose: I wanted to create a woman private eye, and I wanted to change the narrative about women in fiction.

Perhaps a more moral person would have ripped up the check Pauline handed me. However, it seemed like the right amount, a hundred thousand for six weeks of travail and lost income, for the expenses of life on the road, for Faye Mitchell’s fee. Mitchell wasn’t running a charity, she said, and she billed accordingly. ANOTHER TRADITION: BIG PAYOFFS IN THE END

I could hear seconds ticking away in my head. I needed to find something more concrete while I was here. Proof of what was really underway on Yancy, proof of where Clarina died, better still, proof of why she died.

VI. Finds herself back in Lawrence Kansas again in this episode.

“We all know you’ve been struggling since that student you were looking for killed himself,” Stamoran said. “We know you have a tendency for violence. We figure you could have drugged Sabrina Granev and hidden her so you could find her and look like a hero.”

Taylor was a trans femme who’d been on a month-long dig with Peter and five other students in August. The parents were claiming Peter had coerced their son into a sex change to fulfill his sexual fantasies. Here we have the issue of the day. This is a regular feature of these books: whatever the current issue is, it will appear here.