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(80 reviews)
Author: Visit Amazon's Sara Paretsky Page
ISBN : 0399160566
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. V.I. Warshawski helps out her closest friend, Vienna-born Dr. Lotty Herschel, when an unwelcome figure from Lotty's past resurfaces in MWA Grand Master Paretsky's stellar 17th novel featuring the Chicago PI (after 2012's Breakdown). Lotty and another Viennese girl, Kitty Binder, were sent to London in 1939 on the Kindertransport. After the war, Lotty settled in Chicago, while Kitty arrived in the area some years later. Lotty gets in touch with V.I. after Kitty's drug-addicted daughter, Judy, leaves a message claiming that she and her college-age son, Martin, whom she had left in Kitty's care, are in danger. Judy then vanishes. V.I.'s investigation takes her from the high-tech world of computer engineering to a literally stinking meth pit in a farm town outside Chicago, on the hunt for the now-missing Judy and Martin. V.I. also unearths WWII secrets related to the race to build an atomic bomb. Paretsky builds the suspense by deftly weaving the contemporary narrative with flashbacks to Lotty's Austrian childhood. Author tour. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Agency. (Nov.)
From Booklist
*Starred Review* As in previous V. I. Warshawski mysteries, Paretsky works elements of Chicago history into the story, this time referencing the city as a nexus for atomic research and linking the science to the work conducted in Austria during the Nazi occupation. When Judy, the drug-addicted daughter of Kitty Binder, a Holocaust survivor whom Lotty Herschel knew in wartime Vienna, calls Lotty for help and then disappears, Lotty turns to Vic. The investigation leads to a burned-out crack house and the mutilated body of a dead man but not to Judy. Kitty, a bitter, uncooperative, seemingly paranoid crank, seems uninterested in finding her estranged daughter, but she hires Vic to locate her grandson, giving Vic two missing-persons cases in the same family. Twentysomething Martin, whom Kitty raised, has vanished without a trace, and Vic and his grandmother are apparently not the only ones who want to find him. Martin’s boss is afraid that the young man, a physics genius, has absconded with sensitive company information, and he isn’t too forthright about what will happen if he finds Martin first. It’s clear V. I. has several puzzles to solve, and, as usual, she becomes the proverbial stick in the hornet’s nest, putting herself at risk as she follows a twisted trail of ruined lives rooted in the international race to develop an atomic weapon. Vic is at her stubborn, reckless, compassionate best in this complicated page-turner about selfish secrets passed down through generations. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Paretsky has been on a roll lately, her long-running, trailblazing series at its most dynamic since the early days. --Stephanie Zvirin
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Direct download links available for Epub Critical Mass (V.I. Warshawski Novel) Hardcover
- Series: V.I. Warshawski Novel (Book 16)
- Hardcover: 480 pages
- Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons; 1st edition (October 22, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0399160566
- ISBN-13: 978-0399160561
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.6 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Epub Critical Mass
I am comparing Sara Paretsky's new book, "Critical Mass" to her previous novels, not to novels in general.
Sara Paretsky has written 19 books. Most of them - 17 - were VI Warshawski novels and the other two are "stand-alones". Having read them all, I think her newest, "Critical Mass" is the deepest and best written so far. I suppose the title could refer to both the "critical mass" needed to produce an atomic bomb and the "critical mass" of people and plot needed to produce a good book. The atomic bomb stuff I can't explain - way above my pay grade! - but the second, the contents of this novel, I can try to explain.
"Critical Mass" is set in both Vienna and Chicago, the past and the present. The past is the 1900's to the 1940's and focuses on VI's old friend, Lotte Herschel's, family and friends as they find that being Jewish in Vienna, particularly after the Anschluss in 1938, as an increasingly dangerous business. Lotte and her brother are rescued at the last minute and sent to London - and safety - on the Kindertransport. Her family was left behind and all perished in the Holocaust.
Also sent with Lotte and her brother was Kathe Saginor, the daughter of a single mother, Martina Saginor, who was raised with Lotte in Vienna. Kathe, later Kitty, was regarded as a "poor relations" both in Vienna, and later in Chicago, where both women settled after the war. Martina Saginor was a genius who worked in the scientific academies looking into atom. She was later arrested by the Nazis and served as a slave laborer and vanished in the war.
But the Saginor family is not the only family in Paretsky's book. Martina's lover and father of her daughter, a Nobel prize winner, Benjamin Dzornen, has fled to Chicago with his family before the outbreak of war.
5 stars for plot, 3 for characters
Critical Mass does what all good mystery/thrillers should do: it provides riveting action to distract the reader from ungraded midterms and unplanted bulbs, and it opens a window on new information - in this case the back-story of women who worked in early atomic weapons research and computer math/physics. Chicago, of course, is a logical setting for such subjects, and while we don't get scenes under Stagg Field's bleachers back in the day, we do get V.I.'s vivid encounters with various of the university's libraries and librarians as she follows the history of scientists both real and fictive.
The link between present-day Chicago and WW II European women is, of course, Dr Lotte Herschel, although her actual presence in the book is relatively slight. But character development has never been a hallmark of this series.
It's at this point in a Paretsky review where I generally complain that Vic is tiresomely trapped in 80's feminist knee-jerks, and I'm happy to report that very little of that pattern appears here. But there's nothing much to replace it, either. It seems absurd to complain about missing a first-person narrator, but in this installment of her career, VI Warshawski is curiously absent. We get none of the housekeeping angst, little of the dogs, only occasional descriptions of food (no cooking) and no real description of clothing, plus a love-interest where she's literally phoning it in.
These were all elements of the series that originally marked it as a personal narrative of a personable woman, elements now absent or so thin as to be transparent.
Along with Kinsey Milhone and Sharon McCone, VI was the break-through detective of the women's movement.