Sara Paretsky’s most significant protagonist is, no doubt, private investigator V. I. Warshawski: with rare exceptions, all of Paretsky’s books has been written about her cases since 1982. There was also a movie adaptation of a book, Deadlock; Warshawski was played by Kathleen Turner. Body Work is Paretsky’s latest Warshawski crime novel.
In Body Work, Warshawski (a fifty-year-old, intelligent, and rough private eye) is looking after her young cousin Petra in a Chicago art club. The performing body artist, Karen Buckley, asks some of the visitors to paint onto her nude form whilst others videotape the process. A woman, Nadia Guaman paints onto her a strange pink and grey pattern; the sign irates a young Iraq veteran, Chad Vishneski, to the extent of berserking; the two have an ugly quarrel and accuse one another of being spies. Two days later someone shots Nadia as she leaves the same club. When Chad becomes the main suspect and (notwithstanding he just tried to commit suicide) police arrests him, his desperate parents hire Warshawski to help him - it is not easy to convince her, as she believes that Chad was the perpetrator. Nadia's funeral is visited by a suspiciously high profile mourner - and it turns out that her elder sister was killed by a bomb in Iraq. Vic discovers that the odd signs what supposed volunteers paint onto the Body Artist's exposed figure do have some peculiar meaning indeed - however, the Body Artist disappears. Vic’s famous knacks for fist-fights comes in handy when she reveals unpleasant truth about Club Gouge and some of the visitors…
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