By MARILYN STASIO - New York Times - Published: January 6, 2011
What really matters in a Sara Paretsky mystery are the crimes behind the crimes — the corrupt politics, the class divisions, the economic inequities, the dirty business practices and all the other injustices that incite the wicked deeds we love to read about. BREAKDOWN (Putnam, $26.95) takes its first crack at a soft target: a cult series of lurid vampire novels that sends a group of impressionable preteenage girls into a graveyard to perform a giddy initiation ritual for their book club. But once V. I. Warshawski, the intrepid private eye who sees herself as “a street fighter, a product of the mills and ethnic wars of Chicago’s Steel City,” has rescued the girls from the trauma of discovering a murder victim, the true villains come into sharper focus.
A right-wing news operation called the Global Entertainment Network seizes on the fact that two of the girls are related to left-wingers on its hit list. One is the daughter of a liberal university president who blocked the teaching of creationism in biology classes. The other is the granddaughter of the Jewish billionaire financing that same university president’s campaign for a seat in the United States Senate. The network unleashes its most rabid attack dog, a faux-populist journalist named Wade Lawlor, to lead the assault, which extends to the private foundation funded by the grandfather to lend a hand to immigrants and refugees, and to encourage their children by establishing book clubs for little girls with a passion for reading.
Full review at The New York Times.
Full review at The New York Times.
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