The case seems straightforward: A young woman is shot to death outside a nightclub in Chicago and the murder weapon turns up on the bed of a disturbed Iraq war veteran. But when the father of the accused puts private detective V.I. Warshawski on the case, it soon becomes clear that the case is anything but neat and tidy.
Sara Paretsky's latest novel, Body Work, takes her heroine into the world of cutting-edge performance art, PTSD and the mob. It's the 14th installment of Paretsky's Warshawski crime thriller series, which she started writing more than 20 years ago.
Paretsky tells NPR's Neal Conan that letting Warshawski age along the years has been a challenge: She isn't as fit as she used to be and she can't drink as much as she used to. But the writer says she's trying to keep her heroine's age from slowing her down too much.
"I had not realized that I was slowing her down at my pace," she says. "So I thought, 'She's taking all these risks -- she jumps into sanitary canals, she's left for dead in ditches -- she's gotta be able to drink more than I do.' So in Body Work I really upped her drinking levels."
Apart from the drinking, Body Work also boasts some hilariously complicated scenes. In one episode, Warshawski brings a posse of two Iraq veterans, an impulsive niece, a downstairs neighbor and a dog to interview a witness in an urban walk-up apartment. Everyone ends up contributing to getting her to the witness in comically unexpected ways.
Paretsky says scenes like that usually aren't carefully planned. She says she doesn't like working from outlines, preferring instead to let the plot flow organically from the book's starting point.
"What I start with very often is the idea of a crime," she says. "In this case, the actual underlying crime that drives the whole book ... [is] the world of the private contractors doing business in the Middle East, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. And then I want a way to make that a small story. I want a way to make it about people and have it set in Chicago."
In Body Work, readers will find that Warshawski is still drinking, still fighting and still righting the wrongs of Chicago, though not always as gracefully as one would expect of this hard-nosed heroine. Her latest victory is mostly accidental and, frankly, a bit gross.
"She'll take her victories any way she can," Paretsky says. It's all just part of this PI's charm.
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