The V.I. Warshawski Series

What secrets hide behind the razzle-dazzle of the entertainment industry? V.I. Warshawski is about to find out. Her friend, reporter Murray Ryerson, has just landed a plum job as host of a Global Entertainment network television show. On her way home from the party celebrating the event, V.I. stops to help a woman lying in the street. Her Good Samaritan act exposes dark truths, and suddenly V.I. finds herself playing a game she can only win by staying alive.

When V. I. Warshawski is asked to find a man who’s been missing for decades, a search she thought would be futile turns lethal. Old skeletons from the city’s racially charged history rise up to force her back – a nun who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. dies without revealing crucial evidence, and the elderly sisters who hired her are also keeping important information to themselves. Then V.I. finds that her family is keeping secrets of its own. Afraid to learn that her adored father might have been a bent cop....

When V. I. Warshawski, the hardest-working of private eyes, goes out one night, a stranger is shot and dies in her arms. V.I. has been visiting Club Gouge, where a woman known as the Body Artist turns her naked body into a canvas for the audience to paint on. The show attracts all kinds of people, from Ukrainian mobsters and Iraq war veterans. A tormented young painter shows up too, and the intricate designs she creates drive one of the soldiers into a violent rage.

Carmilla, Queen of the Night, is a shape-shifting raven whose fictional exploits thrill girls all over the world. When tweens in Chicago's Carmilla Club hold an initiation ritual in an abandoned cemetery, they stumble on an actual corpse, a man stabbed through the heart in a vampire-style slaying. The girls include daughters of some of Chicago's most powerful families. For V.I. Warshawski, the questions multiply faster than the answers. Is the killing linked to a hostile media campaign against Sophy Durango?

When private eye V.I. Warshawski is called out to a derelict drug house in a rural town just south of Chicago, she discovers something she wasn't expecting: the mutilated corpse of a man, dumped in a cornfield. It is a discovery that throws V.I. into the fascinating world of physics and invention: a design that sparked the construction of the computer as we know it, the development of nuclear weapons, the wonder of Newton's prisms and a train of dramatic events that occurred in wartime Vienna.

Twenty-five years ago, Stella Guzzo beat her daughter to death and then walked up the street to play bingo at her church. V. I. Warshawski grew up with the Guzzo family. She dated Frank Guzzo when they were teens and knew Stella's murderous rages firsthand. She didn't think about the family again until the day Frank came to her office, wanting V. I. to help his mother with an exoneration claim. The detective wants no part of Stella Guzzo's world, but she doesn't feel able to say no.