Blood Shot (V.I. Warshawski Novels) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

This may seem nitpicking, but if this is how she handles common-knowledge material, can we really trust her with "much technical material"? Fortunately for us, the "technical material" involves some basic chemistry and little else.

This is not to say that "Blood Shot" is entirely without its merits. In fact, it is one of those rare works of art which makes a significant contribution to the genre by virtue of its sheer unmitigated awfulness. Those of us who find, for example, Robert B. Parker's "Spenser" novels irritating and derivative are forced to reconsider in light of this: true, his plots are phenomenally uninteresting, but Parker's characters have a realness about them, he doesn't pad, he is truly funny, and he writes good dialogue. Consider, by comparison, this typical attempt at crackling repartee:

"My, my, you're certainly a sight. Looks like you're been wading through a mud puddle that came up to your waist."

"Yeah, I've been down in the South Chicago swamp."

"Oh yeah? Didn't even know there was a South Chicago swamp."

"Well there is."

Most chapters begin with a pointless rehash of everything (and I mean everything) that happened in the previous chapter, followed by discussion of what she has for breakfast, what clothes she's wearing, and precisely how dirty they are when she gets home. There are smiles galore, from 'wry' and 'unhappy little,' to 'nervous' and 'engaging,' all on the faces of sturdy ethnic blue-collar Chicagoans who, despite years and years of silent stoic suffering, will -- for some unexplained reason -- tell our heroine anything she wants to know after fifteen seconds of verbal bullying.

Then there's the plot, involving a soup of toxic waste poisoning people. It must be admitted that true ecological awareness was shown in the construction of the plot: if it was a cliche in bad 70's cops and robbers TV, it's a good bet it's been recycled here. Think maybe Big Business is bad? Think maybe politicians are crooked? Or that the plot includes: (a) crusading public interest lawyer; (b) anonymous phone calls warning our heroine to stop working on the case; (c) well-meaning friends telling our heroine to stop working on the case because it's too dangerous; (d) detective's refusal to heed warnings because this is A Personal Thing now; (e) attack, beating, and leaving for dead of detective; (f) detective not being dead, despite Forces of Evil's 100% success rate elsewhere; (g) conversations with the pet; (h) the obligatory vice -- in this case a liking for whiskey; (i) the obligatory virtue -- in this case the morning run; (j) heroine annoying local D.A.; (k) break-in and ransacking of apartments; and (l) (all together now) climactic final showdown involving guns and violence and the restoration of moral balance in the world?

This final scene is worth describing in detail for its unintentional hilarity, though there are constraints here. Suffice it to say that the Forces of Evil act as strangely and as stupidly as the villains in the old "Batman" TV series who never think to simply shoot Batman and Robin, and that Warshawski is able to save the day with the aid of an 80 year old woman who demonstrates enough physical agility to suggest that maybe she, like Warshawski, can dunk.