This week, acclaimed mystery writer Sara Paretsky discusses her new book Pay Dirt, the latest installment of her iconic V.I. Warshawski detective series. Paretsky is joined by Booklist editor Donna Seaman. This conversation originally took place April 16, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.

AWM PODCAST NETWORK HUB

See Sara and Donna at the American Writers Festival too! This entirely free literary event takes place May 19, 2024 at the Harold Washington Library Center in downtown Chicago, co-presented by the American Writers Museum and Chicago Public Library. Sara and Donna are part of the Freedom to Read panel presented by the American Library Association.

More about Pay Dirt:

V.I. Warshawski is famous for her cool under fire, her intelligence, her humor, her unflinching courage, and her love of good coffee. But even the strongest people sometimes need a break to recharge, so her friends send her to Kansas for a weekend of college basketball where Angela, one of her protégées, is playing. And that’s where trouble finds V.I.

Sabrina, one of Angela’s roommates, disappears and V.I. agrees to try to find her. Finding a missing person in a city where she knows few people and doesn’t have her trusted contacts is hard, but not as hard as the brutally negative reaction to the detective from some of the locals. When V.I. finds Sabrina close to death in a remote house, she lands herself in the FBI’s crosshairs and faces a violent online backlash. The men running the county’s opioid distribution are also not happy.

Discovering a dead body in the same house a few days later, V.I. is pitched headlong into a local land-use battle with roots going back to the Civil War. She finds that 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 never intended to play, before the clock runs down.