“Breakdown” is Sara Paretsky’s fifteenth V.I. (stands for Victoria Iphigenia) Warshawki novel. Even though V.I. (Vic to some) is somewhere north of 50, she is still the same tough talking, hard hitting private eye. The book begins with V.I. doing a favor (what else is new?) for her cousin Petra. Petra has a summer job as the moderator of a book club for tweenage girls. The girls are reading a series of book featuring Carmilla, a shape-shifter who can turn into a raven (among other things). The girls sneak away from the apartment where the book club meeting is being held to attend an initiation ritual in a local cemetery. Petra begs V.I. to round up the errant girls before their parents find out they are missing.
When V.I. gets to the graveyard, however, she not only finds the wayward middle schoolers, but a dead body. The male corpse is splayed atop a crypt, his heart pierced through with a large piece of steel. The body is very close to where the tweens are playing their Carmilla games. Being American young people, they all have cell phones with attached cameras so there is a risk that the girls took pictures of the crime being committed while snapping shots of the initiation ceremony.
Two of the book club members belong to very important Chicago families. One of the girls is the daughter of Sophy Durango, a liberal candidate for the United States Senate. The other is the granddaughter of Chaim Salanter, a wealthy Jewish businessman who is a huge contributor to Mrs. Durango’s senatorial campaign.
V.I. is, of course, the only p.i. in Chicago who can solve the case of the dead body in the cemetery. The corpse turns out to be Miles Wucknik, also a p.i., though one with little moral fiber. It appears that Miles has been blackmailing anyone and everyone (whether he worked for them or not) so there is a long list of those who would benefit from murdering Wuchnik.
To make the situation even more complex, V.I. receives a desperate phone call from her old law school pal, Leydon Ashford. Leydon has just been released from a mental hospital. She wants to tell V.I. about something terribly wrong happening at the hospital. But before the two can meet, Leydon is pushed off a balcony at the University of Chicago Rockefeller’s Chapel.
The one character (besides V.I.) who brings the many threads of the story together is Wake Lawton, a right wing TV journalist who works for a station very much like Fox News. Lawton spends all his time slandering liberals like Senate candidate Sophy Durango and her wealthy supporter Chaim Salanter without ever checking his facts. Lawton is pretty much a one note bad guy, not nearly as interesting as some of the three dimensional criminals found in Paretsky’s earlier V.I. Warshawski detective novels.
At the end of “Breakdown” Paretsky has V.I. stage a very unrealistic media event to make the killer admit their guilt. She used the same kind of trick in her previous Warshawski book “Body Work” and it didn’t work there either. “Breakdown” is an interesting, well-plotted mystery, except for the hokey conclusion. In my opinion a mystery with an unsatisfying finish is not much of a mystery at all. V.I. Warshawski is a fascinating protagonist. I just hope Sara Paretsky doesn’t let V.I. solve any more crimes unless she can solve them the old fashioned way – with shoe leather, intuition, guts and a lot of heart. That formula has worked for most of the Warshawski detective novels. If only Paretsky can remember what made her female p.i. such a great character to begin with.
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