Sara Paretsky publishes 14th Warshawski mystery

CHICAGO — Sara Paretsky's latest installment in her series about feisty, female private detective V.I. Warshawski opens with the heroine outside a Chicago nightclub, the bloody body of a woman who was just shot to death in her arms.

An Iraqi war veteran is charged with the crime and his parents hire Warshawski, setting off a chain of crime and corruption that links Warshawski's investigation from Chicago to Baghdad. From there, the mystery unfolds.

"The person who is arrested in the opening chapter is never guilty of the crime," Paretsky says during an interview in the upstairs study at her home on Chicago's South Side, her golden retriever Callie curled up on the floor nearby.

"Why do the police continue to doubt V.I.'s judgment on these matters, I don't know," she says.

"Body Work" came out Tuesday. It is the 14th novel in the Warshawski series. The plot focuses on a performance artist who sits nude on a nightclub stage and allows people to paint on her.

As hinted in the title, Paretsky says a major theme is the way both men and women's bodies are objectified, whether for sex or war.

"When do we get away from that?" she asks.

Also highlighted is Paretsky's focus on the Iraq war. Her book was released the same day President Barack Obama announced the official withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq. It's a conflict she says she was against before it started.

"I feel really strongly about the people whose bodies are on the line. And I think we've thrown them into this rock crusher and then we're ignoring them," she says.

That social activist stance is nothing new for Paretsky, who left her native Kansas at age 19 in 1966 to do community service on Chicago's South Side. She has worked with groups that focus on issues such as reproductive rights and the mentally ill homeless.

Augie Aleksy, owner of Centuries and Sleuths bookstore in the Chicago suburb of Forest Park, says moral values come through in Paretsky's writing.

"She doesn't hide her opinions about social events that are happening at this time," Aleksy says. "She's not shy about bringing some of her sense of where the world is going or where she thinks it should be going and using it in her fiction."

At the center of this world is Warshawski, who Paretsky says started as a pioneer and "brash, young thing," when she debuted in 1982 in "Indemnity Only."