Contemporary Literary Criticism | Paretsky, Sara - Natasha Cooper (review date 20 October 1995)

Natasha Cooper (review date 20 October 1995)

SOURCE: “Going for the Heart,” in Times Literary Supplement, October 20, 1995, p. 24.

[In the following excerpt, Cooper complains that Paretsky allows ideas to take presidence over all else in the short stories of V. I. for Short.]

There are several traps in the path of crime writers who develop a detective through a series of novels. The most obvious is the formula that becomes boring for both writer and reader. A less simple but perhaps more dangerous snare awaits novelists who avoid the first by dealing ever more seriously with the evil about which they are writing. …

In V. I. for Short, Sara Paretsky has produced a collection of stories written between 1983 and 1992. Necessarily slight, but attractive, they have backgrounds ranging from a regular weekly Go party held by some Japanese neighbours of the Chicago private eye, V. I. Warshawski, to an expensive beauty parlour;...

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