Fallout : V.i. Warshawski 18

V.I. Warshawski''s impossible god-daughter Bernie convinces her to look for August, a young film-maker who has disappeared. The evidence indicates that he has gone to Kansas in the company of Emerald, an older black movie actress who wants to film the story of her life. Her search takes V.I. from the military base Emerald was born on, to the farm where she grew up outside a university town, ploughing up past and present-day secrets as she goes.

What is happening at the former nuclear missile site next door to the farm? What happened at the site in 1983, when students tried to stage their own version of Greenham Common? Everywhere V.I. turns she seems to be finding more trouble - with not a sign of August and Emerald. And then trouble turns to death . . .

For more than three decades, Sara Paretsky has entertained millions of readers with her acclaimed series starring investigator V. I. Warshawski. P. D. James proclaimed, “No other crime writer has so powerfully and effectively combined a well-crafted detective story with the novel of social realism.”

In this, her nineteenth book in the series, Paretsky takes her hero—Victoria Iphigenia by birth, V. I. by profession, and Vic to her friends—on her very first case out of Chicago, when the hunt for a vanished film student and a faded Hollywood star leads her to Kansas. V. I. tracks the pair through a university town and into a past riven by long-simmering racial tensions.  She hopes her search will yield the key to the mysteries of the present but every answer V. I. finds unveils another puzzling question—and leads to more dead bodies.  And in her most far-reaching and disturbing case to date, not even the seasoned V. I. is safe.

Suspenseful and provocative, witty and intelligent, Fallout presents Sara Paretsky and V. I. Warshawski both working at the height of their abilities.

Performed by Susan Ericksen