Another recent pick-up off the New Book shelf was Blacklist, a V.I. Warshawski novel by Sara Paretsky. Now, I thought the first five or six V.I. novels (Indemnity Only, Deadlock , Killing Orders, Bitter Medicine, Blood Shot and maybe Burn Marks) were great. Guardian Angel wasn’t very good. Tunnel Vision was weak. Hard Time was actively bad. Total Recall was pretty nearly unreadable. So what, say Gentle Readers. It’s a common story, and really, how do you expect a writer to write ten good books with one character.
So I stopped paying much attention, and was surprised to see a new one on the New Book shelf. Surprised, and interested enough to pick it up, but not, you know, eager. But it turns out that it’s good. Quite good. Not great, I think, but darned good. So if you enjoyed the first few, and had gone off the series, give it a try.
One of the main things that annoyed me about the last few was the amount of time VI spends growing old and cranky, and the amount of time she spends fighting with her friends. The fact that Lotte and Murray and Sal hardly appear in this one probably disappointed a few people, but I was happy about it. As for the plot, it was good enough. Not Killing Orders good, but good. The points we weren’t supposed to guess but were unbelievably obvious were not actually things we weren’t supposed to guess, nor did guessing them ruin the plot. So that’s all right.
Um, and I like her politics. So that’s all right, too.
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-Vardibidian.