It’s not a major theme of the book, but it’s part of the context in the same way that rush hour traffic on the expressways is part of the context.”

However, by the time I was finishing what became the final draft, it was clear that COVID was to become part of our lives for some time to come, and I felt that the characters needed to respond to it. “Crises come and go, and by publication date you may have written something that’s become obsolete.

“It’s always tricky when there’s an urgent crisis about how much to include in the novel,” she says. Was it a difficult decision for Paretsky to include COVID issues in V.I. has to solve the mystery in the book while at the same time dealing with masks, vaccines, and all the rest of the real-life things we’ve faced over the past two years. Unlike many other authors who ignore the pandemic in their fiction, Paretsky tackles it head on in OVERBOARD. We even sang in January when it was six degrees outside.” There were so many of us that even though we were keeping a social distance, the song carried up and down the street and gave us a much-needed community. Many of us hadn’t met before, but every night at 7 p.m. “One of the biggest helps I got with this came from an ad hoc singing group that formed on my block. I wrote and discarded many times until I got to the core story that is in the final version. There’s something about the pandemic that made it hard to focus…and that was true for OVERBOARD. “I struggled, as everyone did, especially those who, like me, live alone. “OVERBOARD was my COVID book,” Paretsky tells The Big Thrill. I unfortunately fell into the second category.” Others found themselves unable to summon ideas or creative wit. “Some of my writing friends found the isolation a time that focused their creativity in new ways. “I wrote this book during the first year of the pandemic,” Paretsky says in an author’s note for OVERBOARD. Warshawski series and marks the 40 th anniversary of the first time we met V.I. V.I.’s efforts to help the girl send her head-first into a collision with Chicago’s most powerful and connected property dealers that soon puts her own life at risk too. Warshawski thriller called OVERBOARD, in which her iconic female PI battles crime and COVID to solve the mystery of an unidentified young girl she finds near death. Bestselling author Sara Paretsky says writing during the pandemic has been difficult for her-but the result is an exciting new V.I.

Hard Time by Sara Paretsky