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Hardball

Sara Paretsky

2009446 pagesabout 7–10 hours
2009
first published
  • 2009Penguin USA, Inc. · ENGISBN 9781101130469
  • 2009G.P. Putnam's Sons · 446 pages · ENGISBN 9780399155932
  • 2009Thorndike Press · 671 pages · ENGISBN 9781410417503
  • 2010Signet Select · 560 pagesISBN 9780451412935
  • 2009Putnam Adult · 446 pagesISBN 9780399156144

Chicago politics—past, present, and future—take center stage in New York Times–bestselling author Sara Paretsky’s brilliant new V. I. Warshawski novel.Chicago’s unique brand of ball is sixteen-inch slow pitch, played in leagues all over the city for more than a century. But in politics, in business, and in law enforcement, the game is hardball.When V. I. Warshawski is asked to find a man who’s been missing for four decades, a search that she figured would be futile becomes lethal. Old skeletons from the city’s racially charged history, as well as haunting family secrets—her own and those of the elderly sisters who hired her—rise up to brush her back from the plate with a vengeance. A young cousin whom she’s never met arrives from Kansas City to work on a political campaign; a nun who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. dies without revealing crucial evidence; and on the city’s South Side, people spit when she shows up. Afraid to learn that her adored father might have been a bent cop, V. I. still takes the investigation all the way to its frightening end.

How it feels

AtmosphereBleak

How it reads

Plot intensityEventful

When and where

ThemesJustice
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