Contemporary Literary Criticism | Paretsky, Sara - Patricia Craig (review date 21 October 1994)

Patricia Craig (review date 21 October 1994)

SOURCE: “Female Virtues,” in Times Literary Supplement, October 21, 1994, p. 20.

[In the following review, Craig discusses the “female virtues” of the protagonists in Sue Grafton's K Is for Killer and Paretsky's Tunnel Vision.]

There is a moment in the latest Sue Grafton novel, K is for Killer, when the heroine Kinsey Millhone leafs through some back numbers of the magazine Family Circle and finds herself bemused: “To me, it was like reading about life on an alien planet.” What is confronting her, causing distaste and a rueful incomprehension, is a flawless domestic world of beauty aids, floor-cleaners, children and home cooking. Kinsey herself—along with Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski—embodies a kind of female virtue which is at the opposite extreme from the housewifely figment contained in the woman's magazine. She and V. I. (Vic) Warshawski are not...

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