Body Work簡介，目錄書摘
The evening takes a strange turn when one woman's sketch triggers a violent outburst from a man at a nearby table. Quickly subdued, the man-an Iraqi war vet-leaves the club. Days later, the woman is shot outside the club. She dies in V.I.'s arms, and the police move quickly to arrest the angry vet.
A shooting in Chicago is nothing new, certainly not to V.I., who is hired by the vet's family to clear his name. As V.I. seeks answers, her investigation will take her from the North Side of Chicago to the far reaches of the Gulf War.
One of the most popular female sleuths in modern crime fiction was born of her creator's desire for equality for a fictional woman gumshoe. Sara Paretsky says that she saw too many women in fiction being portrayed as "using their bodies to try and make good boys do bad things: it was just a constant in literature of all kinds."
Paretsky had a different plan. She wanted to create a strong female character "who could be a whole person, which meant that she could be a sexual person without being evil. That she could be an effective problem solver, as women are in reality but not very often in fiction or on the screen."
The millions of fans of Paretsky's series of novels featuring Chicago gumshoe V.I. Warshawski would likely say she has succeeded. Though V.I. is comfortable packing heat and tailing nasty suspects, she never loses touch with her basic femininity. Paretsky says that, as she conceived V.I., she wanted a character whose sexuality "had nothing to do with it, except that it made her more fully human." It wasn't, says the author, an easy task. "It just took me quite a long time to come up with a way of being able to do that. And the courage, really, to try and do it at all."
Neither courage nor candor seem lacking in Paretsky. After 20 years on the book tour circuit -- many of them including the limelight that accompanies a bestseller -- the author remains an enthusiastic and approachable subject. Over a quiet lunch, she fielded my questions with grace and frequent laughter: as in her writing, both Paretsky's humor and compassion seem never far from the surface. She worries, she says, that she worries too much but is "grateful that people are willing to go with me where I'm going."
Paretsky's most recent Warshawski tale, Total Recall, is "set in contemporary Chicago, where two stories -- one about a black family whose life insurance has mysteriously disappeared, the other about a man who claims to have recovered memories of being a child at the Terezin concentration camp -- link the present to a very grim past."
Now 54, Sara Paretsky lives in Chicago with her husband, ex-Naval officer and retired physicist, Courtenay Wright. She is currently supposed to be at work on the next installment in the V.I. Warshawski series, likely due in a bookstore near you in the autumn of 2003. But it's also possible that she's cleaning a planter or figuring out a better way to remove bathroom fungus. Read on.
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