Killing Orders

Tough Gumshoe

Sara Paretsky is an acclaimed and multiple award-winning author of crime fiction. Her creation, the smart and tough Chicago detective, V.I. Warshawski (she prefers to use her initials over her full name Victoria Iphigenia), daughter of a Jewish Italian mother and Polish father, a kind and loving man, has been topping charts for years.

Killing Orders, that first came out in 1985 and was #3 in the series, has been reissued in paperback. Those who did not get to read Paretsky can get an introduction with one of the finest, in which Warshawski takes the might of the Catholic Church and the Chicago Mafia, while she helps on-off British lover Roger Ferant to save a company from a sneaky takeover.

When Warshawski is summoned by her Rosa for help, she goes to the mean-spirited woman’s house, because she had promised her dying mother Gabriella, that she would always help her sister, even after Rosa had thrown her out on the house.

Rosa works as a treasurer at the St Albert’s Priory, and when some valuable shares kept in the safe are found to be fake, she is under suspicion. However, no sooner does Warshawski start investigating, her aunt wants her to drop it.

Warshawski is not the kind to give up so she continues and starts getting threatening calls. Then she is attacked with acid and her apartment burnt down. Anyone else would have been scared off, but with Ferrant as a her support, she digs deeper till she exposes a major scandal.

In the fast-paced adventure, a lot keeps happening, as Warshawski struggles to solve the crime, as well as trace the man who threatened her and then tried to maim and kill her.   Her friend Agnes, a stock broker gets shot in her office, her friend Lotty’s uncle gets stabbed and Warshawski, cup of woes just overflows—with a baffled by sympathetic Ferrant by her side, trying to make sense of what is going on.

It’s a proper page turner, and you can’t put it down till it’s finished. Because it is set in the pre tech boom era, there are no cell phones or computers, and there is this quaint institution called the answering service, that gave messages from callers whose calls the subscriber may have missed… far more efficient that a cell phone.  Warshawski never seems to be at a disadvantage because she is not at home to pick up the phone.

Killing Orders

By Sara Paretsky

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 355