PAY DIRT

V.I. Warshawski, leaving Chicago to catch a basketball game in Kansas, is reminded once more that the streets of Lawrence are just as mean.

As Warshawski, still reeling from the trauma of her last adventure, is at the point of heading back home, her sort-of-goddaughter Bernie Fouchard begs her to stick around long enough to track down the whereabouts of soccer player Sabrina Granev, a housemate who’s gone missing. Asking enough questions to antagonize the townsfolk already roiled by the recent firing of Cady Perec, who had the temerity to teach her students about the region’s historic involvement in slavery, by school board chair Brett Santich and by the news that Tulloh Industries plans to develop an oversize retail complex on Yancy Hill, Warshawski quickly tracks Sabrina, who’s taken a serious drug overdose, to an abandoned house on Santich’s property with an unsavory reputation, and the police whisk her off to the hospital. It would be a perfect ending if only Warshawski’s acquaintance, Sgt. Deke Everard of the Lawrence PD, didn’t accuse her of bringing Sabrina to the drug house herself and if his suspicions weren’t redoubled by her return the next morning to the house, where she discovers the body of Clarina Coffin, an activist so meddlesome that she antagonized more people than Warshawski did. Paretsky, with her ferocious appetite for linking apparently commonplace crimes to hot-button issues present and past, roots the town’s current unrest in scandals ranging from the planned development of Yancy Hill all the way back to the checkered provenance of the property.

Readers who care about race, climate change, or corporate and civic responsibility will care deeply about this monster case.