Meeting an anonymous client late on a sizzling summer night is asking for trouble. But trouble is Chicago private eye V.I. Warshwski's specialty. Her client says he's the prominent banker, John Thayer. Turns out he's not. He says his son's girlfriend, Anita Hill, is missing. Turns out that's not her real name. V.I.'s search turns up someone soon enough -- the real John Thayer's son, and he's dead. Who's V.I.'s client? Why has she been set up and sent out on a wild-goose chase? By the time she's got it figured, things are hotter -- and deadlier -- than Chicago in July. V.I.'s in a desperate race against time. At stake: a young woman's life.

Among the first, and perhaps the most compelling, female private investigators of contemporary fiction, Sara Paretsky's incomparable character V. I. Warshawski at last returns to the page in her first full-length appearance since 1994's "Tunnel Vision." Hard Time is the work of a master--a riveting novel of suspense that is indisputably Paretsky's best V.I. Warshawski novel yet. Multimedia conglomerate Global Entertainment has purchased the "Chicago Herald-Star," forcing the paper's staff to scramble to stay employed. Reporter Murray Ryerson, V.I.'s longtime friend and sometime rival, manages to reinvent himself as the host of a television show on Global's network. On her way home from a party celebrating Murray's debut, V.I. almost runs over a woman lying in the street. Stopping to help, V.I. soon learns that her Good Samaritan act will drop her squarely in a boiling intrigue. In a case that forces her to go head-to-head with one of the world's largest providers of private security and prison services, a case that exposes dark hidden truths behind the razzle-dazzle of the entertainment industry, V.I. will be ahead of the game if she gets out alive.

V.I. Warshawski is performing a favor when she drives her young friend Consuelo, 16 and pregnant, and her street-punk husband, Fabiano, to a job interview. When Consuelo's labor begins prematurely, Vic takes her to a private suburban hospital--whose staff, seeing "indigent" written all over a young Hispanic face, treats her only reluctantly. Consuelo and her baby don't live out the night. The next day the doctor who treated her is found brutally murdered, and V.I. Warshawski is hip-deep in a highly personal investigation. What she uncovers is an explosive nightmare of conspiracy and greed--where human life takes a back seat to the bottom line.

V.I. Warshawski may have left her old South Chicago neighborhood, but she learns that she cannot escape it. When V.I. takes over coaching duties of the girls? basketball team at her former high school, she faces an ill-equipped, ragtag group of gangbangers, fundamentalists, and teenage moms, who inevitably draw the detective into their family woes. Through young Josie Dorrado, V.I. meets the girl?s mother, who voices her worries about sabotage in the little flag manufacturing plant where she works. The biggest employer on the South Side, discount-store behemoth By-Smart, pays even less, and Ms. Dorrado doesn?t know how she?ll support her four children if the flag plant shuts down. The elder Dorrado?s fears are realized when the plant explodes; V.I. is injured and the owner is killed. As V.I. begins to investigate, she finds herself confronting the Bysen family, who own the By-Smart company. Founder William?Buffalo Bill? Bysen, now in his eighties, has four sons who quarrel with each other and with him; the oldest,?Young Mr. William,? is close to sixty and furious that his father doesn?t cede more power to him. And then, there?s?Billy the Kid,? Young Mr. William?s nineteen-year-old son, whose Christian idealism puts him on a collision course with his father, his grandfather, and the company as a whole. When Billy runs away with Josie Dorrado, V.I. is squeezed between the needs of two very different families. As she tries to find the errant teenagers, and to track down a particularly cruel murderer, her own life is almost forfeit in the swamps that lie under the city of Chicago.