Thu 16 Jan 2020
Archived PI Mystery Review: SARA PARETSKY – Bitter Medicine.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[4] Comments
SARA PARETSKY – Bitter Medicine. V. I. Warshawski #4. Morrow, hardcover, 1987. Ballantine, paperback, 1988.
A sixteen year old Hispanic girl dies while trying to deliver her baby in the emergency room of a wealthy suburban Chicago hospital, and PI V. I. Warshawski finds she has quite a case on her hands. A malpractice suit follows, and a doctor is the next to die.
Slowly the pieces of he puzzle are fit together. Warshawski is a woman who sweats, cares about her friends, and frets when she makes an error in judgment — and she makes a couple of beauties here. All it does is keep her in the same class as Marlowe and Spade.
PostScript: Don’t take this to mean that I think Paretsky is in the same class as Chandler and Hammett as a writer, however. I meant what I said, and I don’t mean what I didn’t say.
January 16th, 2020 at 10:30 pm
There are now twenty books in the Warshawki series, and I confess that I have stalled out about halfway through. I think that as the books have gotten longer, my interest in actually reading them has diminished in equal fashion.
January 17th, 2020 at 10:24 pm
She is among the best of the women private detective writers, and may be the best P.I. writer male of female working currently.
Her books have gotten denser, and often these days focus on V.I.’s extended family, but strictly on the basis of literary quality, ability, and the weight of her best work there is no one better plying the mean streets and few as good.
January 18th, 2020 at 5:32 pm
I read the first 6-8 Warshawski novels and liked them a lot but as time went on the novels were longer but less engaging. Eventually I stopped reading them. But the early ones were really good.
The postscript which seems like a slam of Sara Paretsky was unnecessary.
January 18th, 2020 at 6:13 pm
It wasn’t mean to be a slam. It was written 30 years ago, after only her fourth book was out, and it was far too early for anyone to really be putting her in the same category as Hammett and Chandler, and thinking about it now, I’m guess I’m still not convinced that it’s so.
That’s where I am now. It sounds as though David might disagree with me about that.
What I did say in the review itself, that it was already clear that Warshawsky was a character who, after only four books, was one written in the same classic mold as Marlowe and Spade, and that I think is true. I still agree with that.