There frequently comes a time in a V.I. Warshawski novel when you have absorbed so much new information about Chicago and its neighborhoods and the people who live in and run them, in the institutions and municipalities we support, that you’re afraid you have hit the maximum input level.
Which is when, inevitably, you sense a knowing smile coming at you from between the lines. After giving you a short breather, maybe to daydream about the Cubs (detective Vic’s favorite team) or indulge your nostalgia, author Sara Paretsky dives back into her relentless probing of the city, from far north to far south, upper class to lower, decades past to this very moment.
Let’s be honest: It will take a reader with a certain kind of fortitude to stay on Paretsky’s urban tour bus until all the secrets are spilled in her latest mystery, “Brush Back” — particularly since North Sider Warshawski herself is reluctant to get on board to return to her old haunts and grievances in the gritty South Chicago neighborhood in which she grew up. What keeps her, and you, from spending the day gardening instead is the unquenchable need to know whodunit, and why — particularly since the story hits so close to home.
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It all starts when Vic’s high school boyfriend, Frank Guzzo, a trucker, asks her to look into his ornery mother Stella’s long-ago conviction for beating his sister Annie to death — something for which she now insists, having served her time, she was framed. Warshawski’s life partner Jake, urges her to avoid having anything to do with “this woman — what’s her name? Medea?” After all, she still blames Vic’s “whore of a mother,” who was Annie’s piano teacher, for turning Annie against her. Stella also blames the family, via Vic’s late cousin Boom-Boom, a star player with the Blackhawks, for ruining Frank’s tryout with the Cubs.
Vic isn’t crazy about the physically imposing Stella throwing a punch at her when she shows up to ask a few questions. But the more that people in Vic’s old parish, St. Eloy’s, get “perturbed by my presence” — and that would include priests and pols and cops — the more she feels the hook of this crazy case slipping in.
Pressing questions crop up early and often: Why was a green young lawyer pressured by his firm into defending Stella, when Annie not only clerked in his office but was having her college education paid for (for questionable reasons) by the head of the firm? Why did a handyman called Uncle Jerry, whom Vic first saw at St. Eloy and then coincidentally spotted at Wrigley Field, turn up dead in the coal dust at a 93rd Street dock? What did Jerry’s murder and the subsequent disappearance of his nephew have to do with construction bids at the ballpark?
And, most gallingly to Vic, a cop’s daughter who went to the University of Chicago, what idiot was responsible for the screaming headlines newly speculating that Boom-Boom — whose 17-year-old hockey-playing goddaughter, Bernie, Vic is looking after — murdered Annie?
Paretsky is never satisfied until she revisits such questions over and over. If some mystery writers favor the jumps and cuts that carry the action forward with a minimum of thought process, she’s a methodical storyteller who needs to keep going over the facts at hand and returning to the far-flung scenes of the crime, even it that spells a bad end for Vic’s Mustang.
But Paretsky is also too conscientious to allow any social or political implications, or mob involvements, to slip away. She reminds us that Stella was tried when the first Operation Greylord indictments of corrupt judges were coming in. We have no need to be reminded, regarding political fixers, that “in the pit where Illinois vipers writhe and hiss, its kind of hard to tell the top snake,” but she takes a muckraker’s delight in telling us that anyway.
She also makes sure she treats the women in “Brush Back,” no matter how disillusioned or threatening, with insight and respect. That includes Betty, Frank’s wife, who thinks Vic never forgave her for stealing him (“You two broke my heart,” Vic admits) and now charges her with sneaking around with him behind her back.
In the end, “Brush Back” has to be one of the most contentious novels you’ll encounter. No matter where Warshawski goes, by train, bus or car, she runs into someone with a beef, a grievance, an accusation, a what-for. You’re left with the image of a long gray dish towel being squeezed until every last drop of grime and dirt goes down the drain — only to be recycled. At 400-plus pages, there’s a lot of squeezing to be done here. But this is, after all, Chicago. To get it right, you’ve got to be willing to pass all kinds of tests.
Lloyd Sachs is a regular contributor to Printer’s Row Journal who writes the crime fiction roundup.
“Brush Back”
By Sara Paretsky, Putnam, 459 pages; $27.95
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this review misidentified a character. Annie, Stella’s daughter, clerked for a lawyer and had her college paid for by the head of the law firm.