Burn Marks

Burn Marks (1990) Sara Paretsky

V.I.’s aunt Elena shows up on her doorstop at 3 in the morning after escaping the fire that burned down the hotel where she was living. As an alcoholic deadbeat aunt is not the idea roomate, V.I. gives her 24 hours to find a new place and get out, but of course that isn’t the end of the story, and V.I. ends up investigating the arson.

I was set to give up on this series after this book, until the last few chapters. V.I. is still a jerk, and I was tired of waiting for her to reform, except that at the end of this book V.I. finally has a long overdue talk with Bobby Mallory. So I’m hoping that their relationship will change in future books, and perhaps her relationships with other will change as well. I’m hoping anyway.

This story, although good, jumps around a bit, and I found myself wondering several times precisely why she was continuing with her investigations, but I suppose it was the fact that she’d been told not to that pushed her to continue.

For 1990 V.I. was still fighting a lot of sexism–sexism that I don’t remember existing to that degree at that time, but as the stories do not seem to be set in any particular year–and she seems only to have aged a year or two since the first book set in 1978–perhaps they are set in the past, when sexism was still blatant, and less subtle than you find today.

But to give Sara Paretsky her due, she does try to give V.I. realistic injuries, and a somewhat realistic recover from those injuries, although I do have to wonder: who is paying for all these hospital visits? Can a private investigator afford good health insurance? (Actually, I wonder this about most hard boiled mysteries I read, where the hero ends up banged up and in need of major medical care. Now wonder they’re all poor. All those hospital bills.)

So the story in this book wasn’t quite as good as previous book, but I have hopes that V.I. is going to stop being a complete jerk, and read the next book in the series.

But this is her last chance. If I still find her maddening in the next book, I’m giving up, selling the books back, and finding a new series.

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