Another good read with VI Warshawsky as the main character. This one finds Victoria caught up in the web of a corporate giant BySmart, a fire at a southside garment factory and the murder of two people connected to BySmart. She is also substituting as a basketball coach in this same community. Excellant read.

(2005)Very good VI Warshwaski story about her coaching a girl's basketball team and the involvement of a Wal-Mart like company and its owner-family in the destruction of a factory whose owner would not go along with their strong-arm tactics to cut his prices on goods sold to them.

This one was pretty enjoyable.

We have VI dealing with being forced to volunteer (voluntold) as a basketball coach at her old high school.

Not only does she have to deal with girls who are in gangs and others who are trying to raise kids, she gets pulled into a family dispute among the rich when she goes looking for donations to help with equipment, uniforms, and other essentials for the team.

I also like how Paretsky works in VI's long term romance with her boyfriend Morello at this point. I liked we get to see VI making it work with someone and also becoming jealous when a colleague (female) from his times overseas comes to stay. We have a lot of interesting characters in this one and though I found some of the things that happened implausible (hence the 4 stars) I really did enjoy this one. ( )

I started reading mysteries in about 1987ish because I saw Sara Paretsky on the Today Show and she made her V.I. Warshawski character sound like someone I wanted to know. She was right and I went on from there to meet many other wonderful characters in many other mystery books but Sara and V.I. will always have a special place in my heart. In Fire Sale, V.I. is back in her old South Chicago neighborhood to help her old high school basketball coach who is too sick to coach and needs V.I. to temp. When one of the players' mom asks for her help looking into something at work and that work then mysteriously burned to the ground, V.I. got her next case. It's as good as all of her adventures. ( )

What I liked:
*The parts about the girls basketball team that V.I. is volunteered to coach, particularly how V.I. ends up bonding with them when she didn't expect to.
*That V.I. is encouraging the basketball team to keep up their studies and to try to go to college as well as giving them life lessons.
*"Billy the Kid" who seems to be the only family member who truly cares for the South Siders.
*Learning about long QT syndrome
*Coach McFarlane also seems to have encouraged her players and cared about them--enough so that V.I. feels she owes it to her coach to do as she's told.

What I didn't like:
*The way Christians are portrayed. The pastor damages a gang member's vehicle because the guy plays loud music outside the church trying to entice his girlfriend to come out to hang with him. The same pastor damages a local business's locks. The church seems to teach that birth control and abortion are sins but doesn't seem to teach the kids about abstinence or why it's important, or about the facts of life (such as you CAN get pregnant the first time you have sex). Billy the Kid is ridiculed for his beliefs.
*Sex is treated casually by many characters. Freddy seems to have kids by several women. Bron has multiple girlfriends.
*The privileged attitude of the Bysen family ( )