Ghost country /

The gritty adventures of V. I. Warshawski have made the Chicago PI a marquee name among today's sleuths and turned her creator, Sara Paretsky, into one of the mystery world's most popular authors. So it's rather surprising that Paretsky risks her commercial success with a new book that veers sharply from the sure-bet Warshawski series. But Paretsky's latest may be her best book yet; it shows amazing depth and emotion, offers richly complex characters and a stunningly original plot, and provides subtle but caustic commentary on today's social problems. Harriet and Mara Stonds have been raised in luxury by their grandfather, famous neurosurgeon Abraham Stonds. Harriet is the apple of her grandfather's eye--tall, blond, successful at everything she does, always the good girl. Mara plays the role of ugly stepsister, at least to her grandfather, who has told her for years that she's lazy, stupid, and ungrateful. But things are about to change for the Stonds family. A drunken opera singer, a softhearted psychotherapist, a group of homeless women, and a mysterious visitor who performs miracles will each play a key role in opening the eyes of Harriet and Mara to a world they've never imagined. This book is rich, astonishing, and affecting, and Paretsky deserves rave reviews for taking a huge risk and doing so with amazing success. An outstanding novel and a great read. --Emily Melton

V.I. Warshawski's creator hops from mystery to mainstream in a novel centered on a Chicago wall, said to weep the Virgin Mary's blood, that draws disparate troubled souls. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The Holy Spirit, or someone very like her, appears on the mean Chicago streets usually watched over by Paretsky's detective V.I. Warshawski (Windy City Blues, 1995, etc.)--and, brother, is she in a state. If ever a world needed a lift, it's the environs of Midwest Hospital, where bean-counters have reduced dedicated psychiatric residents like Dr. Hector Tammuz to drug-dispensing slot machines and the neighborhood streets surrounding the Orleans Street Church and Hagar's House, its shelter for homeless women, teem with the poor, the hopeless, and the dispensers of those other drugs. The ranks of the downtrodden have been swelled by the addition of Luisa Montcrief (nƿe Janice Minsky), an alcoholic diva who's fallen a long way from Verdi, and Mara Stonds, the ugly-duckling granddaughter of legendary neurosurgeon Dr. Abraham Stonds. Both women, stung by the retributive preaching of Promise Keeper look-alike Rafe Lowrie at Orleans Street, are drawn instead to Madeleine Carter, who swears that she saw the Blessed Virgin on the concrete wall of the Hotel Pleiades on Underground Wacker, and that the rust stains on the wall are the Virgin's blood. Throughout her impassioned opening scenes, Paretsky limns a world hurting for redemption despite the best efforts of its (overwhelmingly male) leaders to buy it off. But although she skillfully prepares for the advent of her savior, the aphasic street-person Starr, Paretsky isn't quite up to the task of breathing life into this psychotic saint, ""the most urgently alive person Mara had ever met,"" as she goes about curing the sick, turning grape juice into wine, and raising the dead before meeting her own violent death and mysterious resurrection. It's disappointing to find that Starr, so shadowy and indistinct herself, lives in her far more vivid followers mainly as a rallying point for feminist social reform--which comes down here to settling scores with men. Still, Paretsky's ambitious, ambiguously religious novel earns an honorable place in the gallery of straight fiction by mystery writers from P.D. James's Innocent Blood to Waiter Mosley's RL's Dream. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.