Pay Dirt

Legendary detective V.I. Warshawski uncovers a mystery with roots dating back to the Civil War in this edge-of-your-seat thriller from New York Times bestseller Sara Paretsky.
V.I. Warshawski is famous for her cool under fire, her sardonic humor, and her unflinching courage. All that changes when a case ends with a father killing the child she'd been hired to find. She's second-guessing herself, forgetting to eat, forgetting her workout.
Her worried friends send her down to Kansas for a weekend of college basketball; Angela, one of her protégées, is a Northwestern star. And that's when V.I.'s troubles really begin.
Sabrina, one of Angela's roommates, disappears and V.I. agrees to stay behind to try to find her. Finding a missing person in a town where she doesn't know anyone and has no snitches is hard, but not as hard as the local reaction to the detective. When V.I. finds Sabrina close to death in a drug house, the mother's gratitude quickly turns to suspicion. V.I. finds herself in the FBI's crosshairs, and the young men running the county's opioid distribution are not happy.
When V.I. discovers a local troublemaker's dead body in the drug house a few days later, she is pitched headlong into a local land-use battle with roots going back to the Civil War.
Today's combatants are just as willing as opponents in the 1860s to kill to settle their differences. V.I.'s survival depends on keeping one step ahead of players in a game she doesn't even know she's playing.
"Sara Paretsky's legendary P.I. is at the top of her game." - Tess Gerritsen
"Sara Paretsky is a legend . . . If you haven't read her yet, now is the time." - Harlan Coben
"V.I. Warshawski is one of my all-time favorite investigators. Doesn't get any better than this!" - Lisa Gardner
"An author of matchless intelligence, craft, and power. This is why Sara Paretsky reigns as one of the all-time greats." - Karin Slaughter
"Legendary V.I. Warshawski is as dogged and ferocious as ever. So is Sara Paretsky, who is at the top of her crime novel game."

- C.J. Box
"Among today's P.I.'s, nobody comes close to Warshawski." - Publishers Weekly
"Revel in the superb pacing, the well-developed characters and the crisp dialogue from one of the most consistently excellent writers in the genre." - BookPage
"Chicago's V.I. Warshawski is on top form." - Seattle Review of Books
"A proper hero for these times . . . To us, V.I. is perfect." - Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review, on Dead Land
"Sara Paretsky's gloriously kick-ass private eye, V.I. 'Vic' Warshawski, is . . . the definition of perfection in the genre." - Washington Post on Dead Land
"Swift and superb." - Seattle Times on Dead Land