"HARDBALL," by Sara Paretsky, Putnam 2009, 446 pages, $26.95 (f)

No good deed goes unpunished, so when V.I, Warshawski (Vic to her friends, including legions of readers) helps a homeless man who is ill, it inevitably launches her on a journey of both self-discovery and crime solving.

The trip to the hospital introduces Vic to a pastor who convinces her to help two elderly sisters find out what happened to a young relative, Lamont Gadsden, who disappeared 40 years ago at the peak of the civil-rights marches and unrest. One of the women is Gadsden's mother, who seems not to care much. The other, his aunt, is failing and wants to know, before she dies, what happened to the boy she so dearly loved.

It's a pretty thankless journey, peopled with a fair number of unpleasant folks, but one of the fascinating things about Vic is her inability to let go once she gets going on something, even when there's no upside for her in continuing.

And because life with Vic is never simple, although it's always interesting, there's the little matter of the disappearance of her beautiful young cousin and the displeasure of her overbearing uncle, run-ins with gangsters and a tie-in to Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil-rights marches of the 1960s. She shakes the dust off a lot of resting skeletons, at great peril to herself.

Naturally, the two story lines at some point converge for a finish that is wholly satisfying, though not completely expected.

The best of the book is the introspective part: Vic's mother died of cancer when she was a teen, and she also sorely misses her now-deceased policeman father. This case will shake some of the ideas she had about them and force her to look within to figure out who they were and what it all means to her.

This is one of Paretsky's strongest books. And readers who have tagged along on more than a dozen of Vic's adventures are getting to know her pretty well, warts and insecurities and kindness and all. She's a thoroughly rendered character who feels like a friend or much-loved sister, and when she makes mistakes, you wince.

But it all makes her victories so much sweeter.

e-mail: lois@desnews.com