Sara Paretsky

Breakdown Sara Paretsky

Carmilla, Queen of the Night, is a shape-shifting raven whose fictional exploits thrill girls all over the world. When tweens in Chicago s Carmilla Club hold an initiation ritual in an abandoned cemetery, they stumble on an actual corpse, a man stabbed through the heart in a vampire-style slaying. 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. Warshawski, the questions multiply faster than the answers. Is the killing linked to a hostile media campaign against Sophy Durango? Or to Chaim Salanter s childhood in Nazi-occupied Lithuania? As V. I. struggles to answer these questions, she finds herself fighting enemies who are no less terrifying for being all too human."