April 12, 2004
Deadlock
The book I finished listening to on the trip home this weekend was Deadlock, by Sara Paretsky; the main character is V.I. Warshawski; I think this was the first of the series.
The novel is generally pretty good; a well written detective novel. In the way of detective novels everywhere, it takes a basically uninteresting topic---grain shipments around the Great Lakes region---and weaves in an interesting murder mystery. Along the way, you pick up a fair bit of knowledge about the random topic, too!
What really made it fun, though, was that A) it took place in Chicago, and B) it took place in 1982. Not so long ago, but imagine a world with no cell phones---they have to keep checking in with their answering services---and no internet---at one point, she can't figure out where a town in Canada is located! Not to mention the incidental stuff, like the Oldsmobile Omega she drove at one point. And the Chicago thing is neat too, because a lot of the goings-on were in places I knew to some extent. Vic (the title character) lives in an apartment on Halsted just north of Belmont, about a block from my uncle's house where my cousins were growing up. She has an office right next to an El line downtown. At one point she's driving along the Dan Ryan, then up the JFK to the Edens Junction. Et cetera, et cetera. Now I have to seek out the other V.I. Warshawski novels. :)
"Basically, I just give talks that are long digressions." --Dan Savage
Posted by blahedo at 8:37pm on 12 Apr 2004