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BREAKDOWN
by Sara Paretsky
Putnam, January 2012
432 pages
$26.95
ISBN: 0399157832


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

By a happy coincidence, the latest VI Warshawski thriller is being released on the same day as the Iowa caucuses, an event that ushers in what is promising to be one of the most volatile and contentious US political campaigns in memory. Summertime Chicago is already caught up in the fuss (of course - politics in Chicago is a blood sport) as BREAKDOWN opens, with a virulently right-wing TV personality, Wade Lawlor, baying after a Senatorial candidate, Sophie Durango, for her opposition to Creationism, among much else. His heart, as it were, belongs to her opponent in the race, Helen Kendrick, whose supporters wear a sparkly American flag pin topped by a tiny ear of corn.

VI just happens to be a a party celebrating Lawlor's 10th anniversary on the air when she gets a call from Petra, her annoying young cousin who appeared in BODY WORK. Petra is beginning to grow up a little and has been working with a charity that pairs girls from an exclusive private school with underprivileged children, apparently in the hope that each would learn something from the other. What they two groups have in common in this instance, however, is a passion for the "Carmilla" books. These feature a shape-shifting heroine and some vampires, and the girls are just young enough to hope its all true. So seven of them from Petra's group descended on a local cemetery for an initiation ceremony, but found themselves in the company of a corpse, a stake though his heart. As some of these girls are very highly connected indeed and one the daughter of the senatorial candidate Sophie Durango, all of this could prove highly explosive. VI of course does what she can to save cousin Petra's bacon.

But what ensues is not the political thriller we've been expecting. Rather it is a story about families, especially about brothers and sisters. There are several pairs of them - Lawlor and his sister, murdered almost thirty years ago, but whom he still publicly mourns on his TV show; VI's dear, mad friend Leydon and her brother, Sewall, who detests her; the dead PI Miles Wuchnik and his sister Iva, and others less prominent but still pertinent to the story.

As has been true in recent VI novels, the case inevitably reflects events from the distant past. Secrets must be kept and some at least are willing to kill to keep them. Some of these secrets are shocking, some merely sad. VI picks her way gingerly through the minefield, risking her own life in pursuit of the truth.

BREAKDOWN is a sprawl of a book in some ways, ranging over terrains that do not have an inevitable connection. And the final reveal chapter is a bit of a stretch. Nevertheless, VI remains her old self - a little more worn, joints decidedly more achy, hell on her wardrobe, but still committed to getting at the truth regardless of consequences. Her Chicago this time is even more unlovely than usual - dirty, testy, filled with hot air both literal and pouring out of television talk shows. It's an edgy place and civility is in short supply. In short, it sounds a lot like the country as a whole. I'm not sure that VI Warshawski can set things to rights, but I certainly want to be with her as she tries.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, December 2011

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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