Sara Paretsky has 33 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 11 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.9★ across 26 ratings. The most-rated is Shell Game.
Hard Time
Summary
Multimedia conglomerate Global Entertainment has purchased the Chicago Herald-Star, forcing the paper's staff to scramble for new jobs. Reporter Murray Ryerson, V.I. Warshawski's long-time friend, lands a plum job as host of a Global network television show. On her way home from a party in honor of Murray's success, V.I. stops to help a woman lying in the street. Her Good Samaritan act sends her straight into a case that exposes dark hidden truths behind the razzle-dazzle of the entertainment industry. And suddenly, V.I. finds herself playing a game that she can only win by staying alive.
©1999 Sara Paretsky (P)2000, 2017 Newstar Media / Phoenix Books
Windy City Blues
Summary
It's strictly Friends & Family as V.I. Warshawski, "the detective mystery fans have been waiting for" (Time), makes return appearances in a collection of stories that bring new meaning to "ties that bind." Decked out in her silk shirts and no-nonsense Attitude, V.I. is out to make a living - by the skin of her teeth. In "Grace Notes," V.I. has barely finished her morning coffee when she sees an ad in the paper asking for information about her own mother, long dead. The paper leads V.I. to her newfound Italian cousin Vico, who's looking for music composed by their great-grandmother. What's the score? Clearly it's something to kill for... "The Pietro Andromache" finds V.I.'s friend Dr. Lotty Herschel with motive and means to dispatch her professional rival and steal his priceless statue. Lotty didn't do it - but does she know who did? V.I. soon cuts to the art of the case - and it's not a pretty picture at all! Summoned by an old high school friend to a race "At the Old Swimming Hole," V.I. ends up swimming with the sharks - the FBI and a ruthless gambling kingpin - in a pool of blood.... And it's only "Skin Deep" when a relaxing facial transformation transforms a client into a stiff. V.I.'s pal Sal needs help. Her beautician sister Evangeline is prime suspect - and V.I. has only eighteen hours to crack the case before it's headline news.... "Three-Dot Po" proves there's nothing like a dog. Especially a dog on the trail of her mistress's killer, with V.I. in tow.... In "Strung Out," love means nothing and V.I.'s quick to learn the score as her old friend's tennis-champion daughter is under suspicion for strangling her father with a racket string. And there's more, nine stories in all, in this masterful collection of short fiction starring V.I. Warshawski, "the most engaging woman in detective fiction since Dorothy Sayers's Harriet Vane" (Newsweek).
©1995 Sara Paretsky (P)2017 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Killing Orders
Summary
Killing Orders, V.I. Warshawski’s third adventure, starts when her great-aunt Rosa summons the detective to her cold suburban home. Rosa made V.I.’s childhood miserable and the detective resents the command to help her aunt prove she didn't embezzle five million dollars from a local Dominican priory. All hell breaks loose when a mysterious opponent tries to take Vic off the case by throwing acid in her eyes and burning down her apartment. And when a friend who’s involved in the case is brutally murdered, it begins to look as if Vic hasn’t got a prayer. But Warshawski continues to follow every lead, even when they point to some pretty unorthodox conclusions: Perhaps the Dominicans are covering up a financial scandal. Maybe the whole conspiracy is under the patronage of an international conglomerate, or of Don Pasquale, king of the Chicago mob. Worst of all, someone who’s close to Vic could be involved — her darkly handsome English lover, Roger Ferrant, or even Aunt Rosa herself.
©2005 Sara Paretsky (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Bitter Medicine
Summary
Chicago private eye V.I. Warshawski knows from the start that Consuelo Alvarado's baby is trouble. Consuelo is 16. Diabetic. And the daughter of a friend. When she goes into labor too early, even V. I.'s wild drive to get her to the hospital can't save either Consuelo or her child. Soon V.I. is investigating possible malpractice at the emergency room - and falling for a doctor who works there. Mixing business and love is always bad medicine, but V.I. finds herself listening to her heart, not her head. And when a brutal murder and the violent destruction of a woman's clinic put her at the center of a very dirty conspiracy, justice may be the only remedy for a hurt that cuts deep...and chills right to the bone.
©2010 Sara Paretsky (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Deadlock
Summary
Deadlock, V. I. Warshawski’s second case, involves the huge Great Lakes shipping industry. Once again the subject is murder - this time the “accidental death” of Boom-Boom Warshawski, an ex-hockey star and V. I.’s beloved cousin, who fell - or was pushed - off a rain-slicked pier on Chicago’s busy waterfront. Convinced that Boom-Boom was in fact killed because of information he had uncovered about criminal doings on the shipping lines, V. I. begins a long and frustrating search for her cousin’s murderer. In the course of an investigation that takes her to a remote Canadian port city and a calamitous trip on a sabotaged freighter, V. I. finds all too many possible candidates for the killer, including a grain company executive involved in extortion; and rival heads of two shippers, one of whom is being blackmailed for his criminal past; a hockey player whose specialty is graft; and Boom-Boom’s lover, an icily beautiful dancer with expensive tastes in men and merchandise.
©2011 Sara Paretsky (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Total Recall
Summary
In Total Recall, Sara Paretsky brings together several disparate plots in one gripping story. This powerfully suspenseful novel confronts the machinations of a vast and corrupt industry that trades on the victims of Nazi terrorism; the strange and dubious phenomenon of "recovered memory;" and a personal story that brings V. I. Warshawski into the long-buried past of her dearest friend and mentor, Dr. Lotty Herschel. Lotty was a child of nine when she came to England in 1939 as a refugee from Austria. Having lost her entire family to the Nazi terror, she grew up and completed her medical training in London - and there fell in love with a fellow refugee. She ended the affair when she discovered she was pregnant and bore the child in secrecy, giving it up for adoption. Now, that long-held secret may be exposed. At a national conference in Chicago on Jews in Modern America, a man with recovered memories makes a dramatic appearance and claim - and his name brings consternation to Lotty. V.I. is retained to find out whether or not he is a surviving relative of Lotty's. It's a search that meshes stunningly with the pursuit of another case she is on - for what she uncovers, to her great peril, is brutal insurance fraud on an international scale. Total Recall is Paretsky's most spectacular achievement to date, and takes V.I. to new heights of gusto, guts, passion for justice - and risk.
©2004 Sara Paretsky (P)2004 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Blood Shot
Summary
V.I. Warshawski isn't crazy about going back to her old south Chicago neighborhood, but a promise is something she always keeps. Caroline, a childhood friend, has a dying mother and a problem - after 25 years she wants V.I. to find the father she never knew. But when V.I. starts probing into the past, she not only finds out where all the bodies are buried - she stumbles onto a very new corpse. Now she's stirring up a deadly mix of big business and chemical corruption that may become a toxic shock to a snooper who knows too much.
©2009 Sara Paretsky (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Guardian Angel
Summary
Racine Avenue is going upscale — bad news for hand-to-mouth residents like V. I. Warshawski. As tax bills skyrocket, newcomers pressure old inhabitants into fixing up their homes or moving out. To the yuppies on the block the worst eyesore belongs to old Hattie Frizell, whose yard is “returning to native prairie, complete with hubcaps.” Their block club wants her and her five dogs gone.V. I. and Hattie have a relationship of sorts: one of those five dogs gave V. I.’s dog Peppy an unwelcome litter. When Hattie slips in her bath and is rushed unconscious to the hospital, V. I. feels compelled to get involved. But neighboring lawyer Todd Pichea and his wife, Chrissie, act swiftly to get the courts to make them Hattie’s legal guardians. V. I. returns from a business trip to find they’ve put the old woman’s dogs to sleep. Furious, V. I. starts poking around in the Picheas’ affairs, hoping to turn up something scandalous enough to make them lose their guardianship. Hattie isn’t the detective’s only worry. When her downstairs neighbor’s oldest friend disappears, Mr. Contreras persuades V. I. to investigate. As she probes both problems, V. I. uncovers a scandal linking one of Chicago’s oldest industrial families to union fraud and a politically connected bank. Her investigation takes her into the depths of the steamy Sanitary Canal and brings her eyeball-to-eyeball with her ex-husband, Dick Yarborough. When her dear friend Lotty Herschel and her own lawyer turn against her, V. I. is left alone to struggle with the most serious case of her career.
©1992 Sara Paretsky (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Tunnel Vision
Summary
Stubbornness has landed private eye V.I. Warshawski in big trouble at her Chicago office. With her grand old Loop building set to be razed, she's become a hold-out tenant amid frayed wiring and scary, empty corridors. Then she finds a homeless woman with three kids in the basement, and before she can rescue them, they disappear. Worst of all, she's been implicated in a murder - after the body of Deirdre Messenger, a prominent lawyer's wife, turns up sprawled across her desk. V.I., who had volunteered with Deirdre at a women's shelter, suspects her death is linked to a case of upper-class domestic abuse so slickly concealed that the police refuse to believe it. Increasingly at odds with the cops, V.I. is blindly plunging ahead after the truth. And her path may lead to corruption at the highest levels or deep into the abandoned tunnels beneath Chicago's streets, where secrets are hiding in the dark like a child's - or V.I.'s - worst nightmare.
©1994 Sara Paretsky (P)2017 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Breakdown
Summary
A strange crime gets V.I. Warshawski involved with some of Chicago’s most rich and powerful players in this thriller from New York Times bestselling author Sara Paretsky. When a group of Chicago tweens holds a ritual in an abandoned cemetery, they stumble on an actual corpse - stabbed through the heart in a vampire-style slaying. V.I. Warshawski arrives on the scene to escort the girls home - but protecting them places her at the tangled center of the investigation. And the girls include daughters of some of Chicago’s most powerful families: the grandfather of one, Chaim Salanter, is among the world’s wealthiest men; the mother of another, Sophy Durango, is running for the United States Senate. For V.I., the questions multiply faster than the answers. Is the killing linked to a hostile media campaign against Durango - or to Salanter’s childhood in Nazi-occupied Lithuania? As V.I. struggles to find an answer, she finds herself fighting enemies who are no less terrifying for being all too human.
©2012 Sara Paretsky (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Burn Marks
Summary
"Victoria, sweetie, you look terrific!" With those words - and the sour yeasty smell of stale beer - Elena, V.I. Warshawski’s derelict aunt, reenters her niece’s life at three in the morning. Burned out of her SRO hotel, Elena has turned to V.I. for a place to stay. V.I. vows that it will be a short visit and uses some old political contacts to find Elena a room. When V.I. is hired to investigate the fire at the hotel, her aunt disappears, and her aunt’s young friend is found dead at a construction site. V.I. is warned off the case by both a high-ranking police officer and a major Chicago developer - who also happens to be a close friend of the chairman of the Cook County Board. After three terrifying attempts on her life, V.I. doesn’t know whether it’s the politicians, the police, or the developers who are after her. As this, her sixth investigation, takes her deep into the workings of both the construction business and Cook County politics, V.I. discovers a connection between the two that brings her to a confrontation where the line between friend and enemy is redrawn to frightening effect.
©2013 Sara Paretsky (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Body Work
Summary
“Doctors take days off — why not PIs?” V.I. Warshawski demands. But when America’s hardest-working private eye goes clubbing, a stranger is shot and dies in her arms. V.I. has been visiting Club Gouge, Chicago’s edgiest nightspot, 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 a menacing off-duty cop to Ukrainian mobsters and Iraq war vets - and V.I.’s impetuous cousin, Petra. A tormented young painter shows up, too, and the intricate designs she creates on the Body Artist drive one of the vets into a violent rage. When the painter is shot, the cops figure it’s an easy collar — PTSD vet goes off the rails, stalks then kills young woman. But the vet’s family hires V.I. to clear his name, and the detective uncovers a chain of ugly truths that stretches all the way from Iraq to Chicago’s South Side.
©2010 Sara Paretsky (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Blacklist
Summary
V. I. Warshawski explores secrets and betrayals that stretch across four generations in this New York Times bestselling novel from one of the most compelling writers in American crime fiction... “A thoughtful, high-tension mystery.” (The Washington Post Book World) “A genuinely exciting and disturbing thriller.” (Chicago Tribune) As a favor to her most important client, V. I. agrees to check up on an empty mansion. But instead of a mysterious intruder she discovers a dead man in the ornamental pond - a reporter for an African-American publication whom the suburban cops are quick to dismiss as a suicide. When the man’s shattered family hires V. I. to investigate, she is sucked into a Gothic tale of sex, money, and power, leading her back to McCarthy-era blacklists and forward to some of the darker aspects of the Patriot Act. As V. I. finds herself penned in to a smaller and smaller space by an array of people trying to silence her, and before she can untangled the sordid truth, two more people will die - and V.I.’s own life will hang in the balance.
©2004 Sara Paretsky (P)2004 Brilliance Audio, Inc.