Fallout audiobook

Fallout is the 18th book in the VI Warshawski series written by Sara Paretsky in 2017. The series stars a ~50ish female Chicago private detective and is in the thriller / suspense genre. Each mystery is contained within a single book, but some characters cross over throughout the series in the subplots. In Fallout, VI's hired by a friend of her niece's to check into the disappearance of a cousin. When VI looks further into it, she believes he took off for Kansas with an older mentor, helping to film the woman's life. VI agrees to take the case and heads to Kansas which she hopes is a short trip. Then, the bodies begin to pile up. The story takes on a much darker focus.Confident the two are in hiding because of a secret they've stumbled upon, VI investigates the larger case that she thinks is the way to find them. Nearly 40 years ago, the US government was testing chemical weapons in a small Kansas town. Some locals were involved, and a few families were impacted. VI finds enemies and friends in this small town, and every time she meets with someone, the person ends up dead or almost dead afterward. Who's following her? What type of bugs have been planted in her cell phone, motel room, laptop, and car? Is the local sheriff on the side of the good guys or the bad guys? All these come to the forefront in this tragic tale.On the whole, it's a clever and complex tale. Something like this has probably happened in real life. It's one of the more tangible and realistic cases we've seen VI tackle. I like how the disappearing duo are African American, but that's pretty much all we handle in this book--meaning... it's not about race for once. The crime isn't an issue of black versus white, or poor versus rich side of town, etc. It's purely a tale of government versus small town, regardless of ethnicity and financial standing. Paretsky usually shines a light on race relations and corruption, so this was a nice change of pace to have a different kind of social crime occurring.Another thing I really liked was the new locale and cast of characters. While Mr. Contreras is mentioned, and Lotty shows up for a quick minute, we only see Bernie Fouchard appear with VI. Everything is different, and it helped the book feel newer. I still want to hear all about my Chicago friends again soon, but this one was a good change of pace. One thing I didn't like very much was the disconnect between the missing duo and the actual shenanigans in the town. Yes, they were sorta mixed up in it, but ultimately, they weren't impacted and I struggled to understand why NOW. Why did the older woman suddenly need to go back home and drag the young kid with her? Sometimes you have to look the other way, which is fine... but I would've preferred a stronger connection.All that said, it's one of the clearer and easier plots to follow. Somewhere between a 4 and 4.5 stars, but I'll round down on this one. One more (#19 - Shell Game) to read next week, then I'm current on this series. The next one comes out in 2020, so I'll get a break and focus on other fave series and authors for the next few months.

I have read every book in the VI Warshawski series and am happy to recommend this one also. It is complex, well-researched and suspenseful. VI is front and center as a take-no-prisoners investigator throughout. Like other authors at her bestseller level, Paretsky also deserves much professional credit for keeping her series timely and fresh.Why only four stars? A few issues in this otherwise-readable book: too many characters generally, a shade too political in a same-old same-old way, the author unloads on poor old Kansas resulting in a large number of very unsympathetic characters, and there are some stereotyped conflicts that seem to be a fallback staple of many authors.I like the action throughout (great sequence at the end), the grudging respect for KU's campus in Lawrence, obviously VI herself and Bernie, and Paretsky's unfailing attention to telling a good story.To be fair, I was spoiled by Paretsky's prior book, Brush Back. Brush Back may well be the very best of the 18-book series.Highly recommended--points above represent small flaws in a well-paced, well-written mystery.

What a pleasure to be in the oh so capable hands of Sara Paretsky to read Fallout, the latest V.I. Warshawski novel. This outing takes Vic away from Chicago for the first time, searching for two missing people in Kansas. To search away from the comfort zone of Chicago takes the impassioned plea of her sort-of god-daughter (a long story) Bernie, the university hockey player. Bernie knows that the young man named August wouldn't have done anything wrong but he has disappeared and is now suspected of a crime. And then it happens there are two missing--August left Chicago for Kansas with an older woman, a former actress. Is this because he does video work part-time? V.I. has loads more questions than answers and nothing holding her in Chicago at the moment. So off she goes.The story itself is quite interesting, taking us to Lawrence, Kansas and the surrounding area. There are issues of race relations and the military v. the public as Lawrence sits not far from the cold war settings of missile silos prepared for the final war of mass destruction throughout so many of the years after World War II. There is also a history of years of town and family lies and gossip and questions.All in all, Ms Paretsky has done it again: written an intelligent mystery that encompasses the history of the place and people as well as the country, and has allowed V.I to be her usual human self in unearthing some hard truths, confronting evil if need be and hopefully helping a few deserving folk (while helping a few undeserving others on their way to punishment).I do recommend this series to those who enjoy a mystery with a strong protagonist. I like V.I.'s style, her occasional brashness, her commitment to her friends, her clients, those who have been wronged. I have been reading these books for some time and find that they have maintained their level of excellence or, in fact, surpassed it in recent episodes.

Victoria (V.I.) Warshawski has long been a favorite of mine; she was a successful Chicago-based private detective and one of the first to be (gasp!) a woman. Over the years, I've always looked forward to a new adventure - and this, I believe, is the 18th. This time, though, a new case takes her from her familiar, comfortable home city to the "wilds" of Kansas - accompanied only by her dog Peppy and expecting that her stay in the Sunflower State will be relatively brief. The reason for the trip? A young Chicago filmmaker wannabe is thought to be accompanying an aging former film star who wants to return to her Kansas roots to film her life story, and both have disappeared. To keep the peace with family and friends, Vic reluctantly agrees to track them down.What she finds is a close-knit community (make that two communities - one white and one black) that is far less than welcoming. The local residents' unwillingness to help is echoed by the local police and representatives of the U.S. Army, who clearly resent her presence. Apparently, the community has lots of secrets they believe should stay that way, all seemingly related to an old Cold War-era missile site in the middle of their otherwise rural nowhere. Tensions build up quickly, as does the body count. Complicating matters is that even if Vic can convince someone to share information with her, can he or she be trusted? What really went on at the missile site all those years ago, and could it possibly be going on yet today? Other complications intervene as well: Her musician love interest left for a can't-miss opportunity overseas, leaving her behind when she refused to accompany him. Will he come back to her, or find fulfillment and romance elsewhere? And will Peppy become so attached to his Kansas doggy day-care helpers that she won't want to go back home to Chicago with Vic?It all adds up to a merry, and sometimes scary, chase that I enjoyed from start to finish. Admittedly, it's not the best I've read in the series, but that was mostly because there were so many characters that I finally gave up trying to keep them straight, figuring they'd all be sorted out in the end (they were). And, while the story line was very interesting to someone like me, who remembers hiding under a desk at school so I'd stay safe during a nuclear attack (I know, I know, but we believed it at the time), the complexity of the "cover-ups" here was a little hard to swallow.All in all, it's another solid installment in a series that's been (and still is) special to me.

It has been eons since I read a V. I. Warshawski novel, and I had forgotten what a master of the private-investigator-thriller genre Sara Paretsky is. This book surely jogged my memory. For those who have not read any books in this series, I believe this one could easily stand alone. A few recurring characters crop up but in ways tangential to the action.Warshawsky is a tough female detective in Chicago but in this story she gets sent out of town to investigate the disappearance of an aging African American film actress and a young wanna-be filmmaker. Her quest takes her to Lawrence, Kansas, the actress's hometown (and the author's as it turns out, which allows her to bring considerable atmospheric verisimilitude to the tale). There our doughty 'tec encounters a large cast of suspicious characters, from a suspiciously attentive army colonel to a ferally savage biochemist and his drunken virago of a wife. In true noir style, the dramatic personae are all vivid, drawn in stark colors, their behavior so outrageous that it would doubtless lead to their being ostracized or jailed in real life--but that's part of the fun: you never know what's going to happen next.The plot is very complicated and twisty, with threads raveling and unraveling all over the place, which is also part of the fun though I fear present-day tastes run to the more elementary. I enjoyed wading into the morass and swallowed every preposterous detail with glee.

Oh, V.I. Warshawski, how I've missed you! It seems an age since we had our last adventure together, although, in truth, it has only been two years since we solved the mystery of Brush Back together. But what a pleasure it is to be once again in your company.I've been making these periodic visits to Warshawski-World since the 1980s when Sara Paretsky started this series. Paretsky, Warshawski, and I have aged together through the years. There are a few more gray hairs among the blonde on Warshawski's head these days and, if the truth be told, on mine as well. But Warshawski is still the wiry, fit detective that we first met in Indemnity Only all those years ago. And she's still the same indomitable, uncompromising seeker after truth that we've come to know and admire in that and all the subsequent seventeen V.I. books. She only gets better with age and experience.In Fallout, V.I. leaves the comfort zone that she knows so well, Chicago, and heads out to Lawrence, Kansas, searching for an actress and a videographer who have disappeared there. The actress is Emerald Ferring, who grew up (as did Sara Paretsky) in Lawrence, and the young videographer is August Veriden, who is a cousin of Angela Creedy, a teammate of Bernadine Fouchard, goddaughter of V.I. who we met in Brush Back. Got all that?Bernadine (Bernie) and Angela ask V.I. to go to Lawrence to find the two who have gone missing and Vic secures a paying customer willing to make it worth her while to take the case. And so she makes the drive to Lawrence with her dog, Peppy, as company. (Her other dog, Mitch, gets to stay in Chicago, and be boarded.) Lawrence proves to be a close-knit, close-mouthed community with a racial divide. African-Americans live mostly on one side of town while white people live on the other. The two people that Vic is looking for are African-American and she finds Kansans very suspicious of her and hesitant to share any information. Moreover, she has no resources in Kansas to fall back on. Even the local police seem unwilling to cooperate in any way in looking for Emerald and August.The body count begins to mount and Vic uncovers some local secrets that everyone would prefer remained secret, including information about biochemical weapons research that was conducted in the county back in the 1950s. She discovers a right-wing militia group that is active in the area, as well government officials who may be trying to cover up a disaster that took place during the biochemical weapons research. But she's making no progress on finding her missing persons.Meanwhile, on the personal front, her lover Jake, the jazz musician, is touring in Europe and wanted Vic to go with him. When she went to Kansas instead, he was seriously put out and it looks as though the relationship may not survive. Poor Vic! She never did have very good luck with men.This is one of Paretsky's more complicated plots, but she never falters and it all comes together and makes sense in the end. And as always, there are clues strewn through the text for the sharp-eyed reader. I was right there with her all the way through, enjoying every minute of the story. This may be my favorite of all the Warshawski books. If not, it's right near the top.

It is always a pleasure to relax and read a Sara Paretsky story. This book finds V.I. Warshawski and Peppy, her golden retriever looking for two Chicagoans in Lawrence, Kansas. Vic is hired by friends of a film student who has disappeared from his home and workplace was vandalized. He is traveling with aged Hollywood star. The twists and turns this tale takes will keep you guessing as Vic's investigation unravels. She touched bases with the army, the sheriff, a city Detective, biological weapons, and racism. Will Vic find the Chicagoans before her life ends? I highly recommend this book and series.

Fallout by Sara Paretsky is the highly recommended 18th book in her long-running V. I. Warshawski series. This time the case takes V. I. out of Chicago to Lawrence, Kansas.Angela Creedy and Bernadine Fouchard (Brush Back, 2015) want Warshawski to find Angela's cousin, August Veriden. The aspiring film maker is missing and the police want to question him over the ransacking the Six-Points Gym, where he works as a personal trainer. It appears that August left Chicago with aging black actress, Emerald Ferring. The two were headed to Kansas to film a documentary about her origins. The trail leads to Lawrence, KS, where the University of Kansas is located and the story evolves into more than simply a search for missing persons.In Kansas Warshawski becomes enmeshed with events that happened in 1983 involving a protest at a missile silo outside of the town and plenty of small town gossip and politics. In response to posters she put up downtown, Sonia Kiel, the mentally -ll daughter of imminent retired KU professor Nathan Kiel, contacts Warshawski to tell her where she saw Emerald and August, but the call ends abruptly. When Warshawski goes to the bar Sonia called from she finds the woman drugged and unconscious. Warshawski calls 911, but this marks the first of several calls she will have to make while unraveling the events of 1983 and how they relate to her present case.The plot on this outing does meander a bit off track and loses sight of the original case for a good chunk of the novel. Paretsky does pull it all together in the end and solves her case. There are several bad guys in this novel along with several ill-informed citizens. Warshawski continues to have an amazing ability to follow the least of clues and ingratiate herself with the right people while antagonizing the bad guys.In the opening "Thanks" Paretsky explains that she grew up in Lawrence and her father was a professor and researcher at the University of Kansas. Lawrence is home to KU (1866), but also to Haskell Indian Nations University (1884). The population is probably around 90,000, not huge, but the city is an easy commute to nearby cities, including Topeka and the KC metro area. There are numerous colleges and universities nearby. I'm going to have to take this review a bit personal because of the location Paretsky choose. I totally get taking a place you knew growing up, and switching things up to suit your story by using the real location but with a new layout and altered terrain. I guess what I found rather troubling was her dislike of Lawrence. It became rather obvious that she harbors some latent animosity toward the city. I've live in Lawrence for about six years, but I have yet to encounter the cliquish behavior, city-wide gossip, or the prejudice she implies still exists. I actually lived in this area of the country many years ago. After moving several times to cities in other states across the country, I chose to move back to this area. So, if you were ever thinking of relocating to the area don't base your decision on what how this fictional novel portrays Lawrence.Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins.http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2017/0...

Read this review in its entirety at The Book Nympho               I have read and loved the V.I. Warshawski  series for a looooong time, since it started in 1982!  I've read and loved them all and Fallout is number 18. The last few I have enjoyed the audio so when I got the chance to review I went for it. Vic is the original and the best for me. The normal setting is in Chicago but in this she goes out of town for her missing persons case.Susan Ericksen is a wonderful narrator and she is Vic for me now. She handles the inner thoughts and feelings of Vic and the dialogue and accents of all the various characters very well. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if they are accurate to the regions but they sound right to me. She really adds to my enjoyment of the story.The pace starts slow but builds throughout. There are so many things going on which are interconnected, so when one tumbles, it is a domino effect.  I was in fear for some of the characters' lives including Vic all along. The bad guys aren't afraid to just kill people to keep things quiet. There are complex layers of good, bad and ugly here, which get intertwined with many not understanding what they are doing even.  Also, people aren't just one thing or the other, good or bad, but shades of these characteristics. Sometimes it feels like she's not even working the original case. Vic sorts it out per usual to the dismay of many people but to save lives in the end.I was carried along with the mystery and the characters. I really loved it! The series is a comfortable old friend. There have been breaks, of multiple years even, between books, but Paretsky manages to come back with adventure and compassion every time. Highly recommended.Listen here: https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/314...

V.I. Warshawski leaves Chicago to head to Kansas to find a missing actress and the documentarian hired to film her "origin story," growing up in Lawrence. The two have gone missing and the clannish locals don't want to discuss it. And most of them take a near-immediate dislike of Vic. (It's not a spoiler to say that there are a lot of moving pieces here, and that everything is connected.)As you probably know, I'm a huge fan of Sara Paretsky's and this book didn't disappoint. The most interesting aspect is the fact that Vic is out of her comfort zone: everything and everyone she relies on is gone. (With one exception: her dog, Peppy. Her other dog, Mitch, is on vacation but Peppy is here.) It's sad, in a way. Of course she's more than capable of handling things on her own, but I feel better, in a way, with Lotty and Max and (of course!) Mr. Contreras nearby. It doesn't help that these are also unfamiliar people and places. And, of course, things are far more dangerous than they initially appeared to be. Highly recommended.

Fallout is the 18th book in Sara Paretsky's popular V. I. Warshawski series. They should be popular, as Warshawski, Vic to her friends (and we're all friends here), is smart, dedicated, athletic, and loyal. She holds her friends and acquaintances to high standards, although not higher than she holds herself. She can travel to a new town – in this case, Lawrence, Kansas – and find a good coffee shop and make friends who go the extra mile for her. While she hit barriers and, while doing so fatigued her, she did not give up. She loves opera and music, and these carry her past the rough patches in her investigations.Detectives in mysteries tend to either be perfect or awful. Vic is near perfect, but she feels fear and moves through it without giving up: "Only a really chicken detective would need the comfort of her dog to go through a house with a dead body in it. I couldn’t possibly be a chicken, so I must have felt I needed her expert tracking skills" (p. 133). In fact, perhaps with Peppy, her Golden Retriever, Vic is perfect, as Peppy is a silent, but unendingly-helpful partner: Peppy thumped her tail once. Agreement. That meant I should follow my impulse and try to get a DNA sample from both Sonia and Cady, to see if the dead infant was related to either of them, to Cady’s mother, or to Sonia as mother. (p. 331)I enjoyed the places in Fallout where fact and fiction meet. Vic went to the University of Kansas campus and passed a portrait of David Paretsky, who "had done something unusual with peptides in a beast called rickettsia" (p. 324). She reminisced about Chicago sites that I love. The Obamas showed up twice, but President Trump did not. In her acknowledgements: Note: I finished writing Fallout in August 2016, so no mention is made of cataclysmic events later in the year. (p. 434)When I read mysteries, I have two questions: (a) Can I hop into the middle of this series successfully or after a long gap since reading the last one? Yes. I loved Paretsky in the 80s and 90s, but hadn't gone back to her this century (I can never tell whether I've read her books by the title).(b) Will this book/series surpass my admittedly low tolerance for thrills and gore? No. There are thrills, but Fallout is not a roller coaster that interferes with my sleep at night.

I hadn't read a V.I. Warshawsky mystery in years, and all the ones I had read before were much earlier ones. This is the 18th one in the series, and "Vic" is an older (fiftyish?) woman, very confident and capable I thought. And she needs all her experience--and moxie-- in this one, as she's largely on her own, with her golden retriever Peppy. What made this Warshawsky story especially interesting to me is that she finds herself off her home turf--and in a faraway exotic land called Kansas ( I've traveled around the world and been to almost all the states--except for Kansas, right at the geographic center of the country!). She takes on a case to find two missing persons who are African-Americans. Needless to say the Chicago P.I. is looked upon with distrust and suspicion by both white and black people in Lawrence, KS ( Lawrence being the small city where much of the action takes place). She is able to gain allies and helpers on her case and, as she investigates, finds herself in an increasingly dangerous situation. But I knew that she--and Peppy--would survive and she would solve the mystery. That's why we like novels in a series like this! 4 stars--because of the character more than anything, but I did find the mystery to be interesting, although, be warned, it is complex and a lot of characters pop up in this story.

I love Vic! This one reminded me of some of Ms Paretsky's best books. Can't wait for the next one.