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| Fire Sale (A V. I. Warshawski Novel) | 
 enlarge | Author: Sara Paretsky
Publisher: Large Print Press
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy New: $4.22
You Save: $9.73 (70%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  37 reviews
Sales Rank: 1049889
Format: Large Print
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 712
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.4
ISBN: 1594131473
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781594131479
ASIN: 1594131473
Publication Date: August 30, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Book Description
A nagging conscience makes V.I. Warshawski agree to fill in as coach for the girls' basketball team at her South Side alma mater-which in turn leads her to the headquarters of By-Smart, the global retail empire where V.I. hopes to get some desperately needed funds for the struggling squad. But conscience seems to be in short supply at By-Smart...with the exception of Billy Bysen. He's the earnest teenage grandson of the chain's gruff, tight-fisted founder. And when Billy disappears-along with a mysterious document much desired by By-Smart's management team-V.I. is hurled onto a twisted, body-strewn path that runs through Chicago's dirtiest places, and reveals some of its dirtiest secrets.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 32 more reviews...
 AN ACES DETECTIVE STORY READING July 20, 2005
19 out of 20 found this review helpful
Able voice performer Sandra Burr gives another aces reading as she takes on the persona of dauntless private detective V. I. Warshawski. There's humor, suspense, drama and, perhaps best of all, V.I. on her old stomping grounds, the South side of Chicago.
She's returned there on a kind of errand of mercy - filling in for the coach of the girl's basketball team at her old high school. Such girls V.I. didn't see when she was in high school - high-strung, unmarried moms, a bit of a motley bunch. Nonetheless, V.I. digs in with her usual vigor and sets out to get some corporate backing for the team. First stop is By-Smart, a hugely successful discount store owned by one of her former classmates, Buffalo Bill Bysen. Seems that helping the team isn't high on Buffalo Bill's agenda. Nor, in actuality, is seeing V.I. again. That is until his son disappears.
The vanished young Bysen isn't V.I.'s only challenge - a mother of one of her team members suggests there's foul play at the factory where she works. That's an understatement because the factory soon explodes injuring V.I. and killing the owner.
As V.I.'s investigation continues she also finds an updated West Side Story only from the South Side of Chicago - Bysen's son has run away with a young Latina.
Although this is Paretsky's 12th time out with a Warshawski novel, V.I. is as fresh and appealing as ever.
Good listening for detective story fans.
- Gail Cooke
Still the Best in her Field. November 3, 2005
18 out of 20 found this review helpful
Sara Paretsky, along with Marcia Muller, created a subgenre in the mystery field with her series of Warshawski novels. And from the beginning, she stood apart from the rest by looking at the important issues of our time, framing them in the lives of ordinary people, while using the conventions of the genre to hook readers into compelling plots, dialogue and...suspense and action.
Like P. Schumacher, I have often compared her to Dickens because of her ability to create fabulous characters (including some terrific villains) while making complex political issues accessible to people who otherwise are turned off to politics.
In taking on the Walmartization of America, she has plenty of material. And she explores the issue from a variety of angles, including from the point of view of people forced by circumstance to be trapped in chronic underemployment. At the same time, she shows how the predatory practices of BigBox America destroys communities, including small business.
Any she does this while weaving a darn good story.
However, I would suggest the reader avoid at all costs the Brilliance Audio edition as voiced by the worst narrator working in AudioBooks today. Sandra Burr, despite the "spotlight" reviewer's opinion is totally wrong from this or any book for adults. She has no understanding of the characters or the book's subject matter, and her characterizations truly hurt the book. She is distracting when she gives a 19 year old young man the voice of a 12 year old girl....and everytime she does dialogue, my immediate impulse was to to track to down Paretsky's agent and demand she renegotiate her contract with Brilliance.
 Social injustices November 23, 2005
16 out of 19 found this review helpful
Private Investigator, V.I.Warshawsky, returns to her childhood neighbourhood at the request of her old friend and basketball coach, Maryann McFarlane, to take over her job as coach of the girl's high school basketball team until a replacement can be found. The school is in a depressed, run down and dangerous area where drug use is commonplace and young girls routinely get pregnant and drop out of school. Most of the local industry is controlled by one wealthy family the Bysens, who own a huge chain of stores and factories, and who use the desperate need for local employment to underpay their workers and to keep them under comtrol. V.I. tries to help the teenaged daughters of these local workers to make something of themselves and to aim for college educations, but it's an uphill battle all the way. When strange things begin to happen at one of the factories, V.I. becomes involved in what turns out to be a sabotage attack which leads to murder and violence. This was my first V.I.Warshawski novel and I'm sure that if I had previously read the many others in the series, which include her friends and characters who appear regularly, I would have enjoyed this book even more.
fabulous South Chicago mystery June 29, 2005
12 out of 15 found this review helpful
Private Investigator V.I. Warshawski says no when her former basketball coach at Bertha Palmer High School Ms. McFarlane asks her to take over the girl's team until she can come back to work or another volunteer surfaces. The coach reminds Victoria that basketball enabled her to get a scholarship to the U of Chicago. That fails to move Victoria, but when Coach mentions she is having cancer surgery implying she will never return Vic reluctantly takes over the sixteen girl squad that includes gang members and a center with two kids.
One of the team's stars Josie Dorrado asks Ms. Warshawski to talk with her mother who is concerned with rumors she overheard that someone is going to blow up By Smart's nearby manufacturing plant. If this happens many people including the older Dorrado will be out of work as By Smart is the biggest employee besides maybe the gangs in the depressed South Chicago. In spite of expecting nothing, Vic. goes to check out the tip when the explosion occurs. At about the same time, Josie and Billy Young, grandson of the By-Smart owner, run away. Vic hopes to find the teens before they get into trouble and also uncover who blew up the plant killing someone she knows while recovering from injuries and finally coaching teen basketball.
The who-done-it starts late, as Sara Paretsky provides her fans with an absorbing tour of Warshawski's old neighborhood. The team is delightful to follow with their fights, cliches, and camaraderie with several having unique personalities. More personal than usual, FIRE SALE is a fabulous South Chicago mystery that provides an interesting new side to V.I. that of mentoring coach. Sara Paretsky talent shines through with each book she writes.
Harriet Klausner
 VI loose in her old S. Chicago hood, chasing shadows July 10, 2005
9 out of 16 found this review helpful
We've read the entire prior dozen entries in Paretsky's Chicago leading lady, private investigator V.I. Warshawski series -- so we guess we're fans at least by default. We were definitely not fond of her just prior "Blacklist" which was so full of politics that the weak story tired us readers almost as much as VI herself. That VI never gets paid except for boring background checks that could hardly keep her going doesn't get in the way of her mostly unfocused romps about Chicago chasing down just about anything that crops up, whether meaningful or even just interesting or not.
Unfortunately, to us "Fire Sale" is yet another undistinguished addition to VI's ramblings. She is coerced into a daily substitute girl's basketball coaching job (for free of course) at her old high school in what is now little better than a ghetto in South Chicago. Next she's asked (by one of the mothers) to check on possible sabotage at a nearby low-brow flag-making company, one with tangential ties to a big, family-owned retail conglomerate called By-Smart, a Wal-Mart lookalike with no attempt to conceal the copycat story line. One of the founder's grandsons is a sensitive guy who has been working at one of their warehouses in (guess where) S. Chicago, and falls for one of the Latino basketball players. Then the flag company blows up, killing its manager -- but for some reason nobody but VI (including the police) is even interested in what surely must be an arson turned murder. And so the plot plods along for a few hundred pages, with plenty of unrelated visits to VI's boyfriend Morrell thrown in for sexual tension. In the end, another murder (as well as several injuries to our leading lady, none of which slow her down of course) finally leads to a few chapters of suspense as the grand unveiling of the whole scheme reveals who the bad guys were and for whom they were working - with few surprises.
This novel just doesn't give us much to care about. A hundred pages of scene setting with the girls basketball team is hardly entertaining, the 200 pages of By-Smart family bickering and grandstanding was nothing but hokey, and in the end, we just wanted it over. If we're being callous about the underlying socio-economic commentary, so be it - that's not why we read detective stories. What we'd really like to see is VI get a case with some mystery to it we would care about, get paid for being the professional investigator she is supposed to be, and stop walking into obvious injury traps without the slightest precaution. We guess we want a plot with more teeth, more plausible detecting on VI's part, and enough suspense to get us reading through her story in a few hours rather than a week or more. We'll conclude this time with the same thought we did last time - maybe VI's writer is getting as tired of her as we are.
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