Indemnity Only by Sara Paretsky

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"The night air was thick and damp. As I drove south along Lake Michigan, I could smell rotting alewives like a faint perfume on the heavy air."

I had read several V.I. Warshawski novels many years ago and quite liked them at the time so I was happy to find the first book in the series, Sara Paretsky's Indemnity Only (1982). Immediately I felt a strong emotional connection with the Chicago setting as it was precisely the year the novel was published that I came to this country from the then martial-law Poland and I lived for a short period of time just a few blocks away from V.I. Warshawski's office. It felt special to read in a fiction book about places such as the Belmont or Addison intersections of Lake Shore Drive where I used to walk every day exactly at the time that the fictitious events took place there.

Ms. Paretsky introduces her famous private eye, V. I. Warshawski, born of a Polish father, a Chicago cop, and an Italian mother. V.I. is a lawyer: she used to work for the Chicago Public Defender's Office; now she's self-employed as a private investigator. She is hired by a vice-president of a large Chicago bank to find his son's girlfriend. Almost immediately after taking the case she finds a dead body.

V.I. does not have much trouble with the police - other than being ordered off the case - as one of the investigating officers is an acquaintance of her deceased father. But the bad guys do not like her meddling: she is assaulted and badly beaten by thugs from the Chicago underworld, and also told to get off the case. Connections emerge to the powerful labor union, The International Brotherhood of Knifegrinders and their pension fund. Even more interestingly, V.I. learns that the missing woman's father is someone whom she met in her childhood, and that the man is now the president of the Knifegrinders union.

The plot is well constructed and interesting if a bit clichéd. Events happen fast: V.I.'s apartment is ransacked; people other than the police are looking for clues in the case. V.I. meets a lawyer from an insurance company that handles the pension funds. Not only does the lawyer help Warshawski with the case but they also have an affair - a thread well written by Ms. Paretsky. Alas the denouement is to me a disappointment - not because it is predictable but because it seems hastily written.

All in all, I can only marginally recommend the novel. I remember liking the later books much more. The portrayal of Lotty Herschel, V.I.'s friend and a feisty and socially conscious doctor, is the best thing in the novel other than immensely likeable and realistically drawn V.I. herself, clever, vulnerable yet full of "female-chismo." Being Polish by birth I can't resist quoting a bad ethnic joke from the novel (so bad that it is funny):

"You know why Polish jokes are so short? [...] So the Germans can remember them."

Two and a half stars.



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