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Overview
“Truly remarkable.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Rich, imaginative, [and] intensely moving.”—Chicago Tribune
“Astonishing and affecting.”—Booklist
They come from different worlds and meet at a time of crisis for all of them. Luisa, a drunken diva fallen on hard times, discovers on Chicago's streets a drama greater than any she has experienced onstage. Madeleine, a homeless woman, sees the Virgin Mary’s blood seeping through a concrete wall beneath a luxury hotel. Mara, a rebellious adolescent cast out by her wealthy grandfather, becomes the catalyst for a war between the haves and have-nots as she searches among society’s castoffs for the mother she never knew.
As the three women fight for their right to live and worship beneath the hotel, they find an ally in Hector Tammuz, an idealistic young psychiatrist risking his career to treat the homeless regardless of the cost. Tensions in the city are escalating when a mysterious woman appears during a violent storm. Alluring to some, repellent to others, she never speaks; the street people call her Starr. And as she slowly transforms their lives, miracles begin to happen in a city completely unprepared for the outcome.
In this extraordinary novel, Sara Paretsky gives voice to the dispossessed, to men and women struggling to bury the ghosts of the past, fighting for their lives in a world hungry for miracles, terrified of change.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307485434 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/30/2008 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Hometown:
Chicago, IllinoisDate of Birth:
June 8, 1947Place of Birth:
Ames, IowaEducation:
B.A., Political Science, University of Kansas; Ph.D. and M.B.A., University of ChicagoWebsite:
http://saraparetsky.com/Read an Excerpt
1
The Diva Warms Up
SOMEWHERE IN THE distance a bass viol vibrated. She struggled to remember what it meant: an angry person coming who wanted to hurt her. She tried to get to her feet but the floor was so heavy it pulled her down. Or maybe someone had attached weights to her legs while she was kneeling in front of the Madonna. The bass sounded more loudly and she panicked. She wrestled with her nightdress, which bunched above her waist as she thrashed about. Then saw the man leaning over her, his face red-black with fury.
“No, don’t kill me! I didn’t do it, it was someone else, they put weights on my legs!” She could hear herself laughing as she exposed herself to him, her voice bouncing from ceiling and walls and echoing over and over. “Look: I’m not hiding anything!”
“You goddamned bitch!” he hissed. “I wish I could kill you!”
He grabbed a pillow and pushed it toward her face. Someone else wrapped her flailing arms and legs in sheets and tied them tight around her body. She was coughing, gagging, praying for air, and then she was awake.
She fingered her throat. The muscles were so tense that it hurt to touch them. She couldn’t remember the dream now, or even the events of the previous night, but the shadow of the ominous hovered below the surface of her mind. She stretched an arm out for her robe and snatched at empty air. Fear choked her: she was in a twin bed, not her own canopied throne, and she’d gone to bed—been put to bed?—in her clothes. Her silk skirt had bunched up as she slept, making an uncomfortable knot against her lower back.
She flung the covers away and jumped up, much too fast: the room rocked around her and her pantyhose-clad feet slid on the floorboards. Her stomach heaved. She looked about and found a waste can just in time. She hadn’t eaten much recently; all that came up was a sour mouthful of green fluid.
Shuffling along on her knees, she scrounged on the bedside table for a Kleenex. A clock radio caught her eye. One o’clock. Could that be right? The blinds were pulled but sunshine seeped around their edges: it couldn’t be one in the morning, but what was she doing in a strange bed in the middle of the day? Unless the clock was wrong.
She had been going to La Bohème. It might be amusing to see what a community company could do with it, that was why she was wearing her black shantung skirt. She remembered dressing, and even, if she concentrated hard, having a drink with her escort before they set out. That had been around six. She had a vague recollection of the restaurant, of a waiter being rude to her, but none whatsoever of the performance. Maybe they’d skipped it. What had her escort’s name been? An admirer, there were too many to remember them all. This man had even opened his home to her for the last six weeks, but he often drank so much at dinner that he couldn’t stay awake through the theater.
Next to the clock radio was a family photo: Becca dressed as Queen Esther for a Sunday school pageant, dark curls springing in wiry corkscrews around her head, Harry gazing at her with mushy fondness. Becca was a ringer for Harry, the same round face, dimpled cheeks, but pretty—on Harry those features looked like a frog’s. She herself had always preferred Queen Vashti, the beauty standing up to the king’s pointless commands, over the bleating, vapid Esther.
So she was in Harry and Karen’s guest room—silly of her not to recognize it straight away when she’d lived there after Harry forced her to leave Italy, yammering as he always did about her extravagance. If only she were home—her real home in New York, not the apartment where she’d been staying the last few weeks—she could send someone for tea and a masseuse.
At least she could take a shower. She pulled off her pantyhose and dropped them on the floor. The guest bathroom was at the other end of the hall, so she couldn’t undress in here, but she could take off her bra: it had slipped up on her in the night and was digging into her breasts. No wonder she felt as though she were being choked.
There was a large stain down the front of the blouse. Had that been there when she put it on? She hoped she hadn’t embarrassed herself by wearing dirty clothes to a restaurant.
She draped the blouse around her shoulders, the silk cool against her nipples. Maybe it was long enough to use as a dressing gown. As she measured the ends against her thighs Harry’s bellow sounded.
“Is she going to sleep all day? Where does she think she is? Goddam New York in the goddam Plaza Hotel?”
A female murmuring, too soft for her to tell if it was Karen or Becca, and then Harry’s bellow again. “Go in there and get her up. She’s been asleep since four, which God knows is longer than I have, and I want to talk to her royal highness.”
A diffident knock followed by Becca’s head poking around the door. “Oh! You’re awake. Daddy wants to talk to you.”
She pointed to her throat and shook her head.
“You’ve lost your voice?” Becca asked, coming all the way into the room. She was fourteen now, her teeth white behind the barricade of braces, but her hair still a wiry cloud. Instead of Queen Esther’s blue flowing robe she wore layered tank tops over shorts and combat boots.
“Janice? Are you up? We need to talk!” Harry’s blare made her wince.
“She’s lost her voice!” Becca called back, enjoying the drama.
“Then she can goddam find it.”
Harry stomped into the room, but seeing her breasts exposed beneath the draped silk blouse he blushed and looked away. He grabbed Becca and tried to frog-march her from the room.
Becca wriggled free. “Oh, Daddy, you act like nobody I know has breasts. We see each other naked all the time after soccer. I look at my own, for pity’s sake.”
“And don’t talk to me like that: I’m not one of your classmates.” It was an automatic plea, lacking conviction. “Janice, button up your damned shirt and come into the kitchen. We’re going to talk.”
Someone had dumped her jacket and purse on the floor by the dresser. She picked up the jacket and made a great show of arranging it neatly on the back of the chair, pulling on the sleeves to straighten them while Harry snapped futilely behind her. Another show of fussing in her purse for a pen. HOT TEA, she wrote in block capitals on the back of an envelope that she found on the dresser. SHOWER. She gave Becca the envelope and went down the hall to the bathroom, drowning Harry’s protests by turning on the taps full blast.
When the room was filled with steam she stepped under the shower and started kneading the muscles in her shoulders. She let the spray bathe the back of her throat, gargling slightly, then turned her back to the water and gently trilled her tongue along the edge of her front teeth. Using the trill, she moved up and down a half scale in the middle of her range, barely making a sound. When her neck muscles started to relax, she began a series of vowel exercises, still staying in the middle of her range but letting the sound increase a little.
After perhaps twenty minutes of vocalizing someone hammered on the bathroom door, but there wasn’t any point in responding: it was undoubtedly Harry. Not only did she know what he had to say, she’d only get a chill and have to start over again if she stopped now. For another ten minutes she eased her voice into shape within the protective steam, until she deemed it safe to get out of the shower and finish exercising in the music room.
She carefully wrapped her throat in a towel before leaving the tub, keeping her neck covered as she dried herself, then kicking the used towels into a pile in the direction of the clothes hamper.
A cotton dressing gown hung on the back of the door. Karen’s, no doubt, judging by the vivid magenta flowers and tiers of lacy sleeves, but no one she cared about would see her in it and it was better than putting on that soiled blouse again.
The gown had a complicated set of ribbons; she tried to tie it up high enough to protect her chest from the air conditioner’s drafts. To be on the safe side she took another clean towel from the shelf and draped it across her neck. She held her silk blouse over the heap of damp towels: surely Karen would have enough sense to dry-clean it instead of throwing it into the washing machine? She’d remind her as soon as she finished her workout.
Of course, Harry didn’t have a real music room, but the family room held a badly tuned piano, the one from her parents’ house she’d used when she first started singing. As she walked back past the bedroom and down the half flight of stairs she hummed, letting the sound fill her head with the tickling that told her her breath was flowing well. Becca ran up behind her and handed her a mug of tepid tea. She didn’t break stride or stop humming, but did nod a regal thanks.
In front of the piano she let the humming turn back into vowels, and then into trills. At the end of half an hour she was sweating freely but feeling pleased with her flexibility. Partway through she had gulped down the tea and held the cup out for a refill. When Becca didn’t respond she turned, surprised, to find the room empty. The child used to like to listen to her practice. Still humming, she walked back to the bathroom and filled the cup with hot water from the tap.
Karen popped out of the kitchen as she passed. “Oh! When you’re done will you put the towels in the hamper? I’m not doing a wash until Tuesday. Do you want some lunch? Harry had to—”
She turned her back on the nagging voice, not interested in anything Harry might have to do, and returned—still humming—to the family room to finish her workout. In the past she always concluded with “Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca. Her own voice, soaring to that final high D, exhilarated her with its freedom and power. But today she knew at some unacknowledged reach of her mind that she would never manage the aria, and that failure to do so would crack her self-control in front of Karen and Becca. She contented herself with a couple of German art songs that did not place great demands on the voice.
Interviews
On Friday, May 15th, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Sara Paretsky to discuss GHOST COUNTRY.
Moderator: Good afternoon, and thank you for dropping into the barnesandnoble.com live Auditorium. The author who brought you the bestselling V. I. Warshawski series, Sara Paretsky, joins us live to chat about her powerful and haunting new novel, GHOST COUNTRY. Hello, Sara Paretsky, and welcome! We are so glad you could join us online! How are you this evening?
Sara Paretsky: It's good to be here on an absolutely gorgeous evening in New York City.
Francis from Hollywood, FL: I love your V. I. Warshawski series! Thank you for so many terrific books! I haven't yet read GHOST COUNTRY, but I have heard it is not a mystery. What sort of book is it -- could you tell us a bit about it?
Sara Paretsky: I'm glad you like V. I. GHOST COUNTRY isn't a traditional crime novel, but it does have an element of mystery to it. I think of it as a book about magic, about miracles -- and about music, because one of the characters is a diva who has destroyed her career through alcoholism. The diva comes together with several other characters: a rather tightly bound yuppie lawyer, the lawyer's very troubled young half-sister, and a young psychiatrist assigned to treat the mentally ill homeless. The four of them meet at the wall to a luxury hotel in downtown Chicago where a homeless woman believes the Virgin is bleeding through a crack in the wall. The lawyer is opposing the woman, and her sister sides with the woman -- just to cause trouble! When a mysterious figure name Starr appears halfway through the novel, summer in Chicago heats up -- and all the characters' lives are changed in dramatic ways.
Paul Rosano from Plainview, NY: Your books seem to center around Chicago... Are you from Chicago? What draws you to write about it?
Sara Paretsky: I grew up in Kansas, but I came to Chicago in the summer of '66 to do community service work. Martin Luther King was organizing in my neighborhood that summer for open housing and equal pay, and the experience was so exciting that the city really got into my blood. I moved there permanently in '68 (actually I didn't know it was permanently then -- and who knows -- that could change, too.)
Greg Johnston from Illinois: GHOST COUNTRY explores a world not all of us get to see. Did you do research to write about the lives of the homeless characters in your book? What was it like writing from their perspective?
Sara Paretsky: I spent time with a group called Thresholds that provides mobile assistance to the mentally ill homeless. They let me travel with them to visit their clients, but not to speak -- since it takes a lot of work to establish trust with their clients, so I met interesting people -- including a woman who was writing pages and pages of material. I was very curious to know what she was writing, but I had promised not to speak -- that was hard. I also did volunteer work at a drop-in shelter, where I learned that people on the streets run the gamut of life and experience that the rest of us share.
Marilyn Moyse from Bennington, VT: I just received your book in the mail, and I can't wait to read it. I am intrigued, though -- what does the dedication mean, "For Enheduanna, and All Poets Missing in Action"?
Sara Paretsky: Enheduanna was a Sumerian poet -- maybe the first poet whose work was written down. I think she dates back to 2900 B.C. But I never heard of her until I was doing research for GHOST COUNTRY, and it seems to me she was just one of many poets whose work either doesn't survive at all, or whom we never hear of. Finding a voice and maintaining a voice seems so hard to me that I wanted to acknowledge all those poets whose voices we no longer know.
Ken from Wisconsin: Have you retired V. I.?
Sara Paretsky: V. I. and I took a temporary separation while I wrote GHOST COUNTRY -- I like to tell people she went on strike -- she was tired of taking all the hits and not being able to pay her bills. But I've written about a third of a new novel about her.
Nanine from Minnesota: I just love your writing style -- straightforward, yet able to weave in all the right details in all the right places! How did you learn to write, and how did you develop your particular style? Thanks.
Sara Paretsky: Thanks! I think your style is something that develops unconsciously, out of your unique and changing view of the world around you. But the writing itself, that's something I work very hard at. I have often found that a novel wasn't going in the direction I wanted it to -- with GHOST COUNTRY, I wrote two hundred pages about a young composer -- even took music lessons, worked with several composers, and wrote some music for the book (which my publishers are thankful I didn't ask them to include!) -- and then found the book wasn't going in the direction I wanted, so I had to leave that character behind. I often work with a large sheet of newsprint, running all the plot lines in columns so I can see how I want to bring them together. And I rewrite, polish, try to make my writing good -- and then it gets in print, and I see all the things I wished I'd changed while there was still time.
Iris from Wichita, KS: I was reading an article about you on the web that said V. I. Warshawski's language at first reminded you of Humphrey Bogart in drag -- but that you soon forget that, because V. I. was all woman! What makes V. I. Warshawski such a strong character?
Sara Paretsky: What I really was trying to say was that I had the idea for a woman P.I. for about a decade before I actually came up with both the character and the confidence to write my first novel. During that time I kept fiddling around with a character named Minerva Daniels who was very much Philip Marlowe in drag -- I was trying to write satire, which is totally wrong for me, and failing. I was going to do a whole role reversal, have a handsome narrow-hipped young man come into Minerva's office late at night, giving a false name...you get the idea. But I was working for a multinational insurance company, and one day in a marketing meeting, when my boss was being exceptionally tiresome, V. I. suddenly came to me. And I realized that what I wanted was not Marlowe in drag, but a woman like me and my friends, who were at that time -- 1980 -- pioneers in management -- and doing jobs that we hadn't known existed when we went to high school. But V. I. didn't worry about what people thought about her, and she didn't worry about getting fired, so she got to say the things that most of us keep in that little thought balloon over our heads but don't put into words. V. I.'s name even came to me that afternoon.
Rory from Florida: Hello, Sara, I have two questions for you: 1) How do you overcome writer's block? 2) What are your future plans for writing? Thanks a bunch!
Sara Paretsky: Writer's block is everyone's biggest fear. I try to keep writing, even if it's only in my journal, or stuff that I know I won't keep, just so that I keep a rhythm of words flowing. Sometimes weeks or even months will go by before the story starts coming again, but at least the language is with me, ready for when I can use it again for [a] story. I'm working on a V. I. novel right now, and also a short story featuring V. I. -- it's one that intrigues me and may grow into a novel.
Lillian from Houston, TX: What other jobs have you had, before you were a writer? Have these jobs shown up in your novels, anywhere?
Sara Paretsky: I've been working since I was 13, supporting myself since I was 17. I started washing glassware in a science lab. (Carrying 60 pounds of glassware and water in and out of sterilizing ovens at the age of 13 gave me lifelong back problems.) I've been a file clerk, a secretary, and worked for a decade in the insurance industry as a marketing manager -- which is why insurance shows up so much in my V. I. novels. I've never done anything really exciting -- I guess for me adventure has always taken place in my mind.
Bethany Villard from Southampton, NY: GHOST COUNTRY sounds like a very ambitious novel -- how did you go about writing it? Was it different from writing your other novels? How?
Sara Paretsky: GHOST COUNTRY was a real stretch for me -- I loved it and it also terrified me. A crime novel is controlled by the action, and so among the challenges of the novel was coming up with a structure that wasn't action driven. I started with a diva who's lost her career and her voice because of her drinking. She is an utterly self-absorbed person, and I loved writing about her. As Dorothy Salisbury Davis has often commented, villains are much more fun to write about than heroes. Anyway, I knew I wanted my mysterious stranger, Starr, to play a role, and the diva, and then it took me a long time, close to a year of writing and discarding, to come up with the shape that the novel finally found.
Jim from Chicago: What about Chicago made you decide to move there, and why is it the perfect setting for your novels?
Sara Paretsky: I went to Chicago in the summer of 1966 to do community service work; the city really got into my blood that summer. I worked for a man (the Rev. Tom Phillips, if anyone out there knows him, a Presbyterian minister) who was far and away the best manager I ever worked for. He had me and my fellow volunteers involved in every aspect of the city that summer, and it was a turbulent time, with Martin Luther King there trying to organize a movement for open housing and equal pay. It was such an exciting time that when I graduated from college and was at loose ends I moved back to the city, to try to recapture some of that excitement. Chicago is such a dynamic city, but also such a noir city that it is the perfect setting for the kind of books I write.
Maria from Madison, Wisconsin: What made you decide to use such a powerful image of the bleeding Virgin? Are you a religious person?
Sara Paretsky: I would say that I am a questing person, with admiration for the people I know who have genuine faith. The Virgin of Guadalupe seems like an important figure to me, since she is both the Virgin of the Americas, and is depicted like the old Aztec Moon Goddess, with her strong features, appearing on the back of a (male) angel, and surrounded by stars.
Var from Massachusetts: Do you have any more novels that are going to become movies?
Sara Paretsky: I did the story line for a made-for-TV movie that aired in December on the USA network, "When Trouble Follows You Home." Right now there are no plans to turn any of my novels into other movies.
Jennifer from Santa Monica, CA: Do you have any stories to share with us about how you got your start? Thanks. --nosy fan.
Sara Paretsky: Well, I wrote from an early age, but never thought about being a writer -- I grew up in Kansas in the '50s, when middle-class girls knew their destiny was marriage and when we were discouraged from thinking about working outside the home. But I kept writing privately, to work out my feelings or to tell the stories that kept coming into my mind, until I got to be 30, when I realized that if I didn't try actually to write a novel, I might never have the courage to do it. So, I sat down on New Year's Day 1979 to write -- and three years later, to the day, V. I. Warshawski's first adventure, INDEMNITY ONLY was published. I had a lot of help, and some luck, too.
Laura from New York City: You haven't done an author tour in some time. Will you be doing any author readings or events for this new novel? How can I find out more about your schedule?
Sara Paretsky: I'll actually be reading in New York tonight at Barnes & Noble in Union Square at 7:30, and I have a web site -- www.saraparetsky.com -- that lists my entire tour.
Christopher from NYC: Are the religious elements to GHOST COUNTRY based on a real event?
Sara Paretsky: As we get close to the millennium, many of us seem to start feeling a lot of uncertainty, a yearning for the miraculous to get us through these uncertain times. And one of the ways that I saw that yearning working itself out is in the many different ways and places people are seeing the Virgin Mary. She has even been bleeding from a garage wall in my native state of Kansas, which most people don't think of as a setting for that kind of intense event.
Susan from Montpelier: How did you come up with the title for your book? Were there any alternate titles lurking around before it was finished?
Sara Paretsky: Sometimes titles are with me from the beginning, sometimes I can only think of them after I've finished, and twice my publisher has had to help me name the book. (I hate those times. I'm very possessive about my work.) GHOST COUNTRY was with me from the start, I think, because of the sense of the ghosts that we all live with, the voices from our past that haunt us. In addition, a large part of the action in GHOST COUNTRY is in the streets that run underneath downtown Chicago. These are the shipping routes that businesses and hotels use to truck in supplies and truck out waste, and they have become a natural place for the homeless to seek shelter, since they're out of the rain and snow. So this underground network of streets and people began to seem like the ghost country that we try to avoid, but that haunts our lives nonetheless.
bj157389 from @prodigy.com: I love your strong female characters -- great heroines! Could you tell us a bit about the protagonist you've selected for this book?
Sara Paretsky: Thanks! GHOST COUNTRY has several protagonists. The troubled young adolescent Mara in many ways is like I was at 19 -- even with the unruly bush of hair. I grew up when long straight hair was in fashion, and I did everything I could to straighten mine, but it still grew straight out around my head like a bush (somehow aging has flattened all that curl and now I miss it). The diva, who's utterly self-absorbed, isn't much like me, but she does represent my wish that I could make my writing, my art, come first in my life -- I still am haunted by too many of my own ghost voices, so that's my ongoing struggle. For the first time I tried to write also from a male voice, with the young psychiatry resident, Hector, who's assigned to work with the mentally ill homeless. In some ways, in his journals he actually carries my personal authorial voice in the novel.
Kimber from aol.com: Did you visit the sites of any other "miracles" like the one described in your book?
Sara Paretsky: Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get to any of these sites. Although I have been spending a lot of time in Kansas with ill parents, the site in Kansas is 300 miles from their home -- so I haven't been able to get to it. But that's on my travel list for this year.
Rocky from Illinois: How do you compare V. I. to Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone?
Sara Paretsky: Sue is a lot of fun, both in person and as a writer. I think V. I. and Kinsey are like the difference between Chicago and California -- Chicago is a shot-and-a-beer town, where our biggest weather worry is how much snow has come down and will we be able to get to work. California is Chardonnay -- and the weather worry is whether the surf's up today.
Niki from Sudbury, MA: What did you read as a kid?
Sara Paretsky: I read a lot of different stuff, but the writers I remember as really liking a lot were Louisa May Alcott, C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder series.
Justine from Charleston, SC: I have not yet read your book, but I plan to this weekend. The jacket says that you "have written a parable for the millennium" -- did you write this book with the millennium in mind? How do you think the millennium is influencing what fiction is produced in recent times?
Sara Paretsky: I didn't write GHOST COUNTRY with the millennium in mind as much as the anxiety about the millennium suggested some of the themes of the book. That was especially true of the pivotal action of the book, the fact that a homeless woman believes the Virgin Mary is bleeding through the crack in the wall of a luxury garage in downtown Chicago. I think the anxiety about the millennium affects us more than we realize -- that that's why people are scared about all the computers crashing (personally, I think I'll get my tax bill right on time. The IRS never sleeps, but that's another story). And those issues brought the story line to me. And I see that those same issues are on the minds of other writers whose books have just come out, including A. Manette Ansay, and Robert Stone.
John Pringle from Worcester, Massachusetts: Who are your favorite authors? Who, other than your own books, do you recommend to struggling young mystery writers like myself? Thank you.
Sara Paretsky: I think anything you read helps you grow as a writer -- learning what you want to emulate, and what you want to avoid. A writer whose work helps me a lot is the poet Mary Oliver. She has written A POETRY HANDBOOK which actually has valuable advice for any writer, whether poetry or prose, and she has another collection of essays, BLUE PASTURES, which also has great advice for the writing life. I read very eclectically. I lost my mother recently, so have been seeking comfort from old writers, particularly Jane Austen.
Brenda from Mobile, AL: How long did it take you to write GHOST COUNTRY? When you are writing a book, do you write all day? Any tips or words of wisdom for a hopeful young writer?
Sara Paretsky: It actually took me almost three years to write GHOST COUNTRY. That included writing half of a draft that didn't work for me. The idea had been haunting me for about five years before that, but I wasn't quite ready to take the risk of leaving V. I, until three years ago. The rest of your question is a little tricky. Most of my work time is spent thinking about characters, and about story problems. When I know where I am, I write until I physically can't write anymore (which seems to be a shorter time now that it was 15 years ago -- wonder why that is?). I think the most important thing to do if you want to write is to write, and to write from the heart. The market is ephemeral, and if you try to write for it, you will find it has moved on while you've been writing. But if you write from the heart, then you will have work that will bring you personal satisfaction.
Moderator: Thank you, Sara Paretsky! Best of luck with your new book, GHOST COUNTRY. Do you have any closing remarks for the online audience?
Sara Paretsky: You've asked really provocative questions that have helped me think more clearly about my new novel. When you're writing a book, you're in it, and it isn't until you have finished it and see it as a book -- about a year after you're done with it -- that you step back and think, what was I doing? Where could I have done it better? What did I learn that I'll take with me to the next project?