Civil rights serves as backdrop to gripping crime yarn

BOOK OF THE DAY: Hardballby Sara Paretsky, Hodder and Stoughton446pp, £11.99

IT'S BEEN five years since tough Chicago private investigator VI Warshawski took on a case – a long time for her dedicated fans, but it's been worth the wait. Her creator, Sara Paretsky, has written other novels, the most recent Bleeding Kansas, but VI (or Vic as she's known to just about nobody) didn't feature in it.

In Hardballshe's back with more than her usual level of vengeance to investigate the case of a young black man, Lamont Gadsden, who disappeared over 40 years before.

With Paretsky, it’s never a simple case of catching the bad guy – the social and political background is important – and in this tense crime novel the flashbacks are to Chicago during the summer of 1966, when racial tension was fermenting on the Southwest Side and Martin Luther King visited to address a civil rights march.

She discovers a young girl was killed during that rally in Marquette Park and a poor young black man was convicted, all around the time the young man she is trailing disappeared. As the links between the events emerge through painstaking digging – one of the attractions of Warshawski as a character is she shows just how unglamorous being a workaday PI is, the bills still need to be paid, stakeouts are long and tedious – she finds herself in grave danger.

A shiny new political candidate is running for office, backed by the money and influence this requires, and her digging into the past uncovers skeletons in his and his powerful family’s closet.

The insidious pervasiveness of political corruption operating at every level is a theme that Paretsky has returned to again and again, and it’s very much central to this story.

She also comes across some uncomfortable truths about her own much-loved father, a Chicago policeman who worked during those racially charged times. Warshawski was 10 at the time of the civil rights marches, too young to know what was going on but, as she lived through the time and in the same place, it still forms part of her history.

The past overlaps with the present as race becomes an issue when the very white female PI tries to win the trust of Gadsden’s elderly mother and aunt – two superbly written characters – whose low expectations of receiving justice from any authority figure are formed by decades of bad experience.

As a woman in her 50s, she's grappling with her own personal issues, particularly her difficulty in sustaining a romantic relationship. Hardballopens with the ending (or is it?) of a romance, and the arrival of her irritating young niece, Petra, to Chicago means she must explore her relationship with her family.

The tensions between the permanently texting, always perky niece and the older woman used to her own space and way of doing things provide a little light relief in an otherwise dark read.

The meaty backstory doesn't in any way compromise the whodunit tension, and Hardballis a page-turner to the end.

Bernice Harrison is an Irish Timesjournalist