Tag Archives: Eat the Rich

Pay Dirt, by Sara Paretsky*****

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Sara Paretsky is a badass author with a badass protagonist. Her hero, Vic Warshawski, is a rough and ready private eye, and though based in Chicago, she sometimes—as now—finds herself elsewhere when duty beckons. Author Paretsky is one of the three that pioneered the hardboiled female private eye subgenre; the first in this series, Indemnity Only, came out in 1982, over 40 years ago, and that is how long I have been reading them. And though I was lucky to receive a review copy, thanks to NetGalley and William Morrow, this is one of those rare books that I would have paid full price to read if that was the only way I could get it.

This book is for sale now.

This story finds Vic in bad shape, both mentally and physically. She has attempted to help a student of her boyfriend Peter’s, a trans youth whose father blew out the kid’s brains rather than accept their new identity. The brains stuck to Vic, and the experience sent her reeling emotionally. She’s been forgetting self-care, not eating or exercising. What she needs is rest and quiet.

But that’s not how it goes.

Her godchild Bernie persuades Vic to attend a basketball championship game in Kansas. A group of them will be going down there; it’s just what Vic needs, she says. Reluctantly, Vic agrees, but once they are there and the game is over, one of the parties disappears, and Vic is enlisted to find her. When Vic finds the missing basketball player, she inadvertently finds a dead body. The cops in Lawrence, Kansas as well as the FBI like her for the killing. It’s so convenient to have a mouthy, street smart outsider blunder in; hopefully, they can pin it all on her, and then life will go on as it has been. And so Vic must stay behind because she’s been told not to leave town, but also in order to clear her name.

Now, this is one of the elements that generally irritates me in most mysteries; the whole clearing-my-name trope is desperately overdone. There’s another trope that shows up later in the story, but I won’t share it here because it’s a spoiler. But for every rule, there is an exception, and in the case of both tropes, Paretsky breezes through, and I barely bat an eye; this is because the characters are so real to me, and the situation they’re in is so immediate, that I blow it off so I can find out what happens next.

And as is so often the case, Vic Warshawski finds herself up against the town’s wealthy power brokers, who have a vested interest in not having the real killer caught. As for Vic, she makes friends with a few people that have no wealth and no power, but the small ways they assist her make all the difference.

Once she solves the crime, persuades the local police and others that she is innocent and that the blame lies with the men in the suits, are they hauled off in shackles? Don’t hold your breath. As one of her new pals reflects, “That is justice in America, plain and simple, before you wrap it up in a pretty package of Constitutional rights that only the rich get to have.”

The thing that sets this particular book apart from the other very good mysteries I’ve read recently is the development of the protagonist. She’s vulnerable because of her earlier trauma; her boyfriend left the country on business, and he hasn’t been responding to her texts. She is miserable, and she’s isolated. But as the pressure builds, Warshawski delivers. The last quarter of this novel is impossible to put down, and even before that, I set aside my usual rotation of books, because I wanted to read this, and only this.

This novel is written in such a way that a first time reader can jump into the series, but chances are good that once you do, you’ll reach back for some or all of the others. Highly recommended to those that love gritty, rough and tumble detectives; feminists; and those that lean to the left.

On the Line, by Daisy Pitkin*****

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On the Line, a labor memoir by Daisy Pitkin, tells the true story of a grassroots struggle to organize a nonunion laundry in Arizona as part of an industry-wide unionizing campaign. My thanks go to NetGalley and Algonquin for the invitation to read and review. This book is for sale now.

Daisy is an organizer for UNITE, a labor union that organizes textiles, laundries, transportation, service workers, and some others, created by the merger of ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) and ACTWU, the American Clothing and Textile Workers Union (of which this reviewer was once a member and union activist.)  She is working at the ground level, approaching workers in the parking lot, partnering with a woman named Alma that worked there and could talk to other workers inside the factory.

The memoir is written in the second person to Alma, and at first this seems odd, but as I read, I realize this is an effective and intelligent choice. By addressing Alma and the things that Alma has said and done during this fight, as well as the things the author did, along with what they did together, and the occasional differences of opinion they had and how they resolved them, she avoids making herself sound like a martyr to the cause. It would not read nearly so well in the first person, with the reader as audience.

The tasks of the workers all revolve around the commercial laundering process. Immense bags of dirty linens weighing up to 300 pounds are pushed off of the delivery trucks in rolling carts.

“The linen moves down the belt, you said, and then you flicked your arms back and forth to demonstrate how you and the other sorters toss sheets into one bin, towels to another, gowns to a third, and so on. You said, Sometimes they speed up the conveyor, and we don’t have time to be careful. There is a lot of blood and puke and feces. You said, We don’t get shoe covers, so some of us take off our shoes and drive home in our socks. You said, Our gloves are too big—they slip off our hands. Sometimes when they tear open, we have to handle the soiled linen with exposed skin…you were demanding a seemingly simple thing: to work your eight-or-ten-hour shift and come home unharmed. You wanted gloves that hospital needles cannot puncture. You wanted face masks to keep the blood and fluids from other bodies from entering your bodies. You wanted safety guards put back on machines where they had been removed. You wanted linen dust cleaned from the rafters to prevent fires.”

Safety rules are routinely flouted. Dirty linens land on the belt, and the belt feeds them into the mouth of a tunnel washer. When the washer jams, workers sometimes have to crawl through hot, bleachy, contaminated water to clear it and get it working. The supervisors are supposed to cut power when someone is in there, but they don’t. Ultimately it’s a choice for the owners to risk a possible, but unlikely fine from the government, or frequent decreases in production, which cut into profits. The workers are expendable; they can always find more. The wash and dry departments of industrial laundries are the most fatal of all industries, according to U.S. government statistics.

Daisy and Alma are working on a shoestring. When they have to be away from home overnight in order to meet workers as they go in or come out, they sleep in the car. Their signs are made by hand with posterboard and Sharpies. Initially, all of the workers sign cards, but then management begins a campaign of threats and intimidation. Not all of the workers are in the States legally, and most of them don’t know their legal rights. Most of them rescind their votes, and then it’s an uphill climb to get them to sign again.

This is a topic that is of great interest to me, and I was supposed to have read and reviewed this book in April of 2023, but my stomach twisted as I read of the horrific obstacles encountered by workers and by Daisy, and halfway through I had to put it down. Only recently did I slap myself upside the head and resume reading.

In any labor union, there are two sets of obstacles. The first, the one that is obvious, is the company, the bosses. Unions cut into profits, so the owners or boards of directors nearly always fight unionization. The second, and lesser known, is the union officialdom at the top. These people spend more time around the bosses and other highly paid union officers than they do around the workers, and they become jaded, sometimes contemptuous of those that they are supposed to represent, whose dues pay their salaries. When Daisy is eventually promoted, she discovers it’s harder to do anything that is in the interests of the clientele.

The book also includes a fair amount of union history, and it’s clearly explained, well woven throughout the narrative.

For those that are interested in unions and labor history, this is an excellent resource. But don’t read it at bedtime; it will do things to your dreams.

Lone Women, by Victor LaValle*****

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“Queer folk, the Henrys.”

Adelaide Henry is “profoundly lonely,” growing up without siblings, with older parents that spurned the world around them. They had their reasons. And yet, in the opening chapter, as I see Adelaide pour kerosene over both of their lifeless forms and burn them, along with their house, I wonder…were they bad enough to deserve this?

But nothing is as it seems, and this is part of the magical spell that Victor LaValle weaves into this kickass novel, Lone Women. By the time I understand the why and the who and the what, I feel an intimate connection to Adelaide, as if I may be the only one trusted with her secrets.

My thanks go to Net Galley and Random House for the review copy. This is one of the finest novels to be published in 2023, and you should get it and read it.

Adelaide flees the California farm where she’s lived all of her life, and buys a homestead in Montana. Almost everything about her life changes; from the warmth of California to the frigid winters of the Northern Rockies, from life with her parents to one lived alone, and from an all-Black community to one that is almost entirely Caucasian. She brings very little with her, only what she can carry, but she is curiously possessive of her extremely heavy trunk, and though I initially assume that she keeps something of great monetary value inside it, I soon realize that isn’t it. My early notes ask the same thing over and again: “What is in that trunk?”

From there, our story unfolds and I can’t stop turning the pages. I’ve never read a novel of any genre that’s like this one, and I’m guessing that you haven’t, either.

Do yourself a favor. Don’t read the synopsis. Go into it blind. It’s a lot more fun if you learn of the characters and events at the times the author intends.

There’s a powerful message in play, but the story is so adroitly delivered that it never feels like a polemic.

I won’t say more, because I don’t want to ruin it for you, but believe me, the next time LaValle publishes a novel, I will be first in line to read it. Highly recommended, especially to feminists.

The Dirty South, by John Connolly*****

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A few years ago I read and reviewed my first book in Connolly’s Charlie Parker detective series, and I became immediately addicted. Since then I’ve never missed an installment, and after the 17th in the series, A Book of Bones, I more or less stalked the internet to find out when I could find the next in the series. It doesn’t disappoint. My thanks go to Net Galley and Atria Books for this, the 18th in the series. It’s for sale now.

Here, Connolly steps away from the crossed-genre, pants-on-fire entries he’s written recently to scribe a prequel. A couple of new readers have inquired whether to read this before all of the other Charlie Parker books, or treat it as the 18th.  The fact is, you can take it in either direction. On the one hand, I have reached back and read a couple of the first in the series and whereas they are perfectly respectable detective novels, they don’t hold a candle to those he’s written more recently. Once I had read the 14th, which is where I began, I was spoiled and a wee bit disappointed by the earliest books in the series. So whereas it makes sense to start reading with this prequel, I fear some readers will notice a dip in quality if they read this masterful literary mystery Connolly has just published, and then dive into his earliest Charlie Parker books. Again, they aren’t badly written. But they aren’t brilliant, and the most recent five in the series, including this prequel, are. So take that and do as you like with it.

Parker is reeling, as the book unfolds, from the vicious murders of his wife and daughter by a killer that intended to slay him, but found them instead. He is convinced that their murderer is a serial killer, and so he has taken a leave of absence from the police force back home and is touring the country by car, chasing down every murder anywhere that bears a resemblance to theirs. He is a dangerous man, because he has no sense of self-preservation. He sees himself as a man that has lost everything, and such men will take risks that more happily situated investigators would consider unthinkable. He also has a source none of the others can access: his wife, his daughter appear to him now and then, and they tell him things that relate to the case at hand, things that nobody else knows.

Those familiar with the series know that Connolly’s most recent Parker books have veered more in the direction of horror, and they include a number of supernatural events that his earlier work does not. Here he steps away from it, and once again his only information from the great beyond is what the spirits of his loved ones share. His adversaries are purely mortal ones. And as to which is better, it’s hard for me to say. His last book prior to this one is a monster, and it includes a tremendous amount of historical research that I find appealing, along with some hugely original, sinister characters that surely must come straight from the bowels of hell. It’s amazing work.

But there’s something to be said for books like this one, too. Most of Connolly’s work is so edgy and so full of violence that I have had to take it in small bites, lest it affect my overall mood. I didn’t have to do that here. I can crawl under a quilt and read for hours without needing to come up for air. I always make sure I read something less malign for a few minutes before turning out the light, but at the same time, this is a much more comfortable read.

Which is not to say that it’s tame. It isn’t. Someone has murdered Black girls in this tiny Arkansas burg, and Parker pulls into town right on the heels of the most recent one. Right away, it becomes obvious that there’s shifty business going on. The town is miserably depressed economically, and the local robber barons, the Cade family, have a deal in the works to bring a large manufacturer to town.  The Cades stand to make a great deal of money, and the locals, poverty-stricken and jobless or badly underemployed, are convinced that better times are just around the corner.

And so it seems that nearly everyone has a stake in keeping the waters calm. The dead girls had to go and get themselves murdered, just when the deal’s about to go through? How inconsiderate. Yes, their killer should be found and brought to justice; but that can wait until the big dogs have signed on the dotted line.  Prosperity is just around the corner. A scandal might ruin everything, and Parker refuses to cooperate, insisting on justice for the murdered children. The nerve of him.

Connolly’s signature elements—the malign, solipsistic, endlessly greedy local bourgeoisie; the poignance of Parker’s grief and his communication with his dead family; and the fast paced, complex plot with a zillion characters and some snappy banter are all here in spades. As usual, his writing style is literary, and so this may not be the best choice for someone whose mother tongue is not English.

As always, highly recommended. This is indisputably one of the year’s best. As for me, I’ll be keeping an eagle eye out for the 19th Parker book, because nobody else writes like this.