Total Recall - Hardcover

Paretsky, Sara

3.96

3,819 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241141605 ISBN 13: 9780241141601

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2001

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TOTAL RECALL follows VI Warshawski on a road that winds back more than fifty years - and into an intricate maze of wartime lies, heartbreaking secrets and harrowing retribution. The journey begins with a national conference in downtown Chicago, where angry protestors are calling for the recovery of Holocaust assets. Replayed on the evening news is the scene of a slight man who has stood up at the conference to tell an astonishing story of a childhood shattered by the Holocaust - a story that has devastating consequences for VI's cherished friend and mentor, Lotty Herschel.

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Review:

Age and experience has not withered VI Warshawski. In Sara Paretsky's latest tale, Total Recall, the uncompromising and wildly unconventional private investigator chases leads and suspects around Chicago "like a pinball, careening around the city", despite the fact that she is now positively the wrong side of 40. Paretsky's heroine is called in to investigate a seemingly simple case of insurance fraud (one of her specialities), when things get rather more complicated. At a conference on Christian-Jewish relations, the media is attracted by two very different stories: while protesters outside call for the recovery of Holocaust assets from insurance companies in denial, inside, a middle-aged Jewish man--helped by a recovered-memory therapist--recalls a childhood devastated by Nazis.

Warshawski soon becomes involved in both stories. As her journalist boyfriend prepares for a trip to Afghanistan to investigate the dismal human rights record of the Taliban (a timely, if not prescient, angle from Paretsky), a friend of his staying from New York decides to embark on a book on recovered memory, inspired by a TV special on the therapist and her star client. Hired by the author to help check out the duo's authenticity, VI finds herself on a collision course between the past and the present and between her professional life and her close friendship with a group of Jewish friends. One of these, the spiky surgeon Lotty Herschel (a regular Warshawski character), is deeply disturbed to find her own past may be linked in some way to that of the troubled client.

With her sharp wit, cynicism and daredevil approach to her job, Warshawski is as annoyingly loveable as ever. There are enough twists and turns to this, her latest outing, to offer a challenging read to die-hard fans and newcomers alike. Irritatingly, however, Paretsky leaves some major strands of her story untied, leaving you wondering and, as ever, waiting anxiously for the next VI Warshawski adventure. --Carey Green

Review:

A wrenching tale that closes with surprise revelations. -- USA Today

Paretsky writes with the kind of dazzling, diamond-hard clarity that can break your heart on every other page. -- Chicago Tribune

Provides all the corpses, clues and close calls that a reader could ask of a thriller. -- Playboy

Thrilling and moving. -- Washington Post

Total Recall is written with the stylistic verve and intellectual energy of a writer just coming into her own. -- The New York Times Book Review

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