Pay Dirt
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.