Club Gouge: Chicago's edgiest night spot, where a woman calling herself the Body Artist invites the audience to use her naked body as a canvas.
The show attracts all kinds of people, from a menacing cop to Ukrainian mobsters and Iraq war veterans. A tormented young painter comes too, and the designs she creates on the Body Artist drive one of the soldiers into a violent rage.
When the painter is shot, the police assume the shell-shocked veteran went off the rails. But his family hires V.I. to clear his name - and the detective discovers a chain of ugly truths stretching from Iraq to Chicago's South Side.
'With the creation of V.I. Warshawski, Sara Paretsky did more than anyone to change the face of contemporary women's fiction.' Express on Sunday
'Sara Paretsky is on top form ... HARDBALL is a haunting novel, skilfully combining power politics and intensely personal events' Joan Smith, Sunday Times
'Superb' Publishers Weekly
'Within a racial melting pot, Paretsky hits her own personal best; HARDBALL takes the thinking woman's detective to a new level of excellence' Financial Times Weekend
'Paretsky has evoked - and celebrated - the multiplicity of Chicago's neighbourhoods, its old and new immigrants and its tragic history of race relations; and these years of America's financial and political decadence seem to have rekindled her passion for social justice.' Times Literary Supplement on HARDBALL
'HARDBALL is a big, chewy, old-fashioned yarn about a P.I. looking into a sprawling, decade-spanning web of police corruption. But when it's this entertaining, there's nothing wrong with that at all' Metro
Author
About Sara Paretsky
Sara Paretsky was brought up in rural Kansas. After a variety of jobs ranging from dishwashing to marketing she now writes full time. She is a founder and past President of Sisters in Crime, an advocacy group for women in the thriller field. She lives in Chicago with a University of Chicago physicist and their golden retriever.
Launched in 1982 by Sara Paretsky in INDEMNITY ONLY, Vic Warshawski is the toughest gal on the Chicago block, a female private eye who could outfight Philip Marlowe and his kind, as well as outsmart them. Pigheaded and socially conscious, she is the queen of hard-boiled.
V.I. Warshawski series: 1. Indemnity Only 2. Deadlock 3. Killing Orders 4. Bitter Medicine 5. Blood Shot 6. Burn Marks 7. Guardian Angel 8. Tunnel Vision 9. Hard Time 10. Total Recall 11. Blacklist 12. Fire Sale 13. Hardball
