Sara Paretsky

Sara Paretsky (born June 8, 1947, Ames, Iowa, U.S.) is an American mystery writer known for her popular series of novels featuring V.I. Warshawski, a female private investigator. Her books are largely set in and around Chicago.

After she received a Ph.D. in history and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1977, Paretsky worked for a large insurance company until she began to write full-time in 1985. It was with Indemnity Only (1982) that her wisecracking, independent, passionate, and empathetic female private detective was created. That same year American writer Sue Grafton released the first entry in her alphabetically titled mystery series featuring female private investigator Kinsey Millhone. The two novelists were credited with breaking down the gender barrier in detective fiction.

In other V.I. Warshawski novels, such as Deadlock (1984) and Killing Orders (1985), the sleuth becomes the target of violence and learns of conspiracies involving big business, organized crime, and (in Killing Orders) the Roman Catholic church. Paretsky explored social issues in many of her books, including Bitter Medicine (1987), which deals with abortion rights and the medical community, Burn Marks (1990), Guardian Angel (1992), and Tunnel Vision (1994). Many critics considered Paretsky’s best novel to be Blood Shot (1988), which follows Warshawski’s search for an old friend’s missing father and her discovery that ruthless chemical company executives are poisoning her childhood neighbourhood for material gain.

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Paretsky broke from her heroine with the publication of Ghost Country (1998), which features a pair of debutante sisters as amateur detectives, but she returned to Warshawski in Hard Time (1999). Subsequent books in the series included Total Recall (2001), in which Warshawski investigates a man claiming to be a Holocaust survivor, and Blacklist (2003), which is set in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and uses the backdrop of a murder mystery to criticize the U.S. government’s expanded policing powers. In Fire Sale (2005) Warshawski becomes embroiled in a mystery involving a local discount store when she takes over coaching the girls’ basketball team at her former high school. Bleeding Kansas (2008) was another departure from Warshawski and her Chicago milieu; it concerned the disputes and recriminations between two politically and religiously opposed families in contemporary rural Kansas.

Paretsky returned to Warshawski’s investigations in Hardball (2009), which saw her intrepid protagonist pursuing a cold case and, in the process, discovering a long history of physical violence against African Americans by the Chicago police. Warshawski investigates the case of an Iraq War veteran wrongfully accused of murder in Body Work (2010), and she becomes unintentionally embroiled in a political scandal concerning the daughter of a U.S. Senate candidate in Breakdown (2012). Her pursuit of a missing software engineer leads to revelations about the nuclear arms race during World War II in Critical Mass (2013). Brush Back (2015) saw Warshawski digging into a decades-old murder case at the behest of a high-school boyfriend. Later books in the series included Fallout (2017), Shell Game (2018), and Dead Land (2020).

In the mid-1980s Paretsky helped found Sisters in Crime to promote the work of other women mystery writers and to challenge the publication of crime stories marred by gratuitous violence against women. She edited A Woman’s Eye, a collection of crime stories by women, in 1991. Writing in an Age of Silence, a memoir, was published in 2007.