Larry Bassett’s Reviews > Pay Dirt > Status Update

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.”

The cry woke me. I was weeping. I reached for the lamp switch, hand finding empty air. I was in a strange place, alone. Panic hit me. Bad dreams are a routine story mechanism in this series as I begin the last book that has been published in my effort to listen to the entire series in order in the Audible format. Let’s get to it so I can get onto other things finally!

One of the things that authors of series like to do is occasionally to move the action out of the normal local. So this book is not in the Chicago area, but in Lawrence Kansas. I guess that means the dogs will also be missing as well as the elderly downstairs neighbor!

The books in the series regularly deal with current topical issues. The first issue that surfaces in this book is transsexuality.

This is the most recent of the VI Warshawski books and was published at the end of 2024. I began reading this series quite a few years ago and had most of the books in the print form before I transferred to Audible listening in recent years.