Product Description

The bestselling V.I. Warshawski novels have dazzled readers and earned the acclaim of critics everywhere. “V.I. Warshawski rules,” writes Newsweek, crowning her “the most engaging woman in detective fiction.” Of V.I.’s creator, the Chicago Tribune says “Sara Paretsky has no peer.”

Now Paretsky brings her incomparable storytelling brilliance to her most powerful Warshawski novel yet. Total Recall follows the Chicago P.I. on a road that winds back more than fifty years — and into an intricate maze of wartime lies, heartbreaking secrets, and harrowing retribution.

For V.I., the journey begins with a national conference in downtown Chicago, where angry protesters 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 V.I.’s cherished friend and mentor, Lotty Herschel.

Lotty was a girl of nine when she emigrated from Austria to England, one of a group of children wrenched from their parents and saved from the Nazi terror just before the war broke out. Now stunningly — impossibly — it appears that someone from that long-lost past may have returned.

With the help of a recovered-memory therapist, Paul Radbuka has recently learned his true identity. But is he who he claims to be? Or is he a cunning impostor who has usurped someone else’s history ... a history Lotty has tried to forget for over fifty years?

As a frightened V.I. watches her friend unravel, she sets out to help in the only way she can: by investigating Radbuka’s past. Already working on a difficult case for a poor family cheated of their life insurance, she tries to balance Lotty’s needs with her client’s, only to find that both are spiraling into a whirlpool of international crime that stretches from Switzerland and Germany to Chicago’s South Side.

As the atrocities of the past reach out to engulf the living, V.I. struggles to decide whose memories of a terrible war she can trust, and moves closer to a chilling realization of the truth — a truth that almost destroys her oldest friend.

With fierce emotional power, Sara Paretsky has woven a gripping and morally complex novel of crime and punishment, memory and illusion. Destined to become a suspense classic, Total Recall proves once again the daring and compelling genius of Sara Paretsky.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #429990 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-29
• Released on: 2002-10-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 544 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780440224716
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Chicago private investigator V.I. Warshawski returns in an exceptionally well-plotted thriller that focuses attention on V.I.'s longtime friend Lotty Herschel. In a handful of chapters that punctuate the contemporary narrative, the Austrian-born physician tells her own story. More than just a device to draw the many threads of this complex novel together, Lotty's history illuminates the depth and complexity of a character that readers of Sara Paretsky's many books-- like V.I. herself--only thought they knew.

At a conference on the recovery of Holocaust assets, a man named Paul Radbuka surfaces, claiming to be part of the past that Lotty left buried in war-torn Europe half a century ago. The aging Lotty is emotionally shattered. She has never talked to V.I. about those years following her escape from Austria--her youth as an orphaned teenager in England and the brilliant medical career that ultimately brought her to America. But Radbuka's claims have such a dramatic effect on her that V.I. feels compelled to investigate him. Radbuka's early life in a concentration camp has recently come back to him, aided by the ministrations of a recovered-memory therapist. Now he's demanding that Lotty and her friend Max, another émigré, acknowledge his connection to them, something neither is prepared to do. Is Radbuka really who he claims to be? And if he's the impostor Lotty says he is, why is she so terrified of him?

V.I.'s efforts to pin down Radbuka's identity dovetail with another case, that of a client with a beef against an insurance company that's trying to keep the state legislature from passing a Holocaust Asset Recovery Act. It's a little too tidy for coincidence, but since it gives Paretsky a chance to show off her knowledge of Chicago politics, the reader is delighted to accept it. While it's Lotty's voice that brings the dead to life and the past into the present, it's V.I.'s dogged perseverance and abiding affection for her friend that drive this powerful, brilliantly executed novel to a conclusion. This is one of Paretsky's strongest outings in years. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly
Already having established herself as an inventor of the female private eye and a master of the mystery format, Paretsky skillfully expands the form to tackle several convergent themes in a moving novel of discovery and redemption. V.I. "Vic" Warshawski has a traditional mystery to solve: the life insurance policy of black factory worker Aaron Sommers had been faithfully maintained, paid for weekly even when other demands surely seemed of greater urgency. But when Aaron's widow needed to collect, the company denied the claim, saying the policy had been cashed a decade earlier. That leads Vic to Ajax Life Insurance Co. and Ralph Devereux, whom she encountered in her very first case, Indemnity Only (1982). Her investigation is subtly intertwined with another much more personal and wrenching inquiry into the appearance of a man calling himself Paul Radbuka, whose recovered memory as a child survivor of the Holocaust leads him to claim a kinship with Vic's friend Max Loewenthal. Radbuka's claim has an unexpected and drastic affect on Lotty Herschel, Vic's friend and mentor. The twin investigations allow the author to explore simultaneously the issues raised by the Illinois Holocaust Asset Recovery Act and the issue of reparations for the descendants of slaves. Dark, absorbing, probing Paretsky's novel explores the complex web of degrees of guilt and complicity surrounding the fate of Holocaust victims and survivors, with Lotty's story emerging with compelling, terrible clarity and inevitability. (Sept. 11)Forecast: With a six-figure marketing campaign and a subject of universal interest, this novel should bring in lots of new readers who will ensure a healthy run on bestseller lists.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Paretsky is in good form in this new V. I. Warshawski mystery, in which a clever amalgamation of two seemingly unrelated cases tests V. I.'s loyalty as well as her patience and investigative skill. In the first case, a deranged man yearning for contact with relatives who may have survived the Holocaust fixates on a family V. I. knows. His irrational behavior sends V. I.'s mentor and friend, Lotty Herschel, into a frightening tailspin over a long-buried secret that has tormented her since her since her youth in Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe. Concurrently, V. I. is called in to investigate a small-time insurance fraud, which suddenly explodes into a complicated morass of murder and local politics, with its own links to the terrible days of the Nazi regime. V. I. has mellowed somewhat over her years as a Chicago PI, and she steps with particular care here to protect her friends, but that doesn't mean the action's wanting: there are several dead bodies and lots of complications before V. I. works out all the connections. Even then, there are still a few unanswered questions. As usual, the Chicago backdrop is vividly imagined, and V. I. comes across as smart and appealing. Stephanie Zvirin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Good Book intended for Regulars
This was my first aproach to V.I. Varshawski, not mentioning the movie years ago. Total Recall is a long book in a genre that usually rounds mysteries on 300pp (Elizabeth George an exception). Paretsky won't settle for that and sets it up for us to think we're deep into very differents plots: an insurance fraud and a disturbed outcrying holocaust derived patient harassing her friends (Paul Radbuka).

During the book I kept wondering what was wrong with V.I.'s way of treating people, everyone is, for a moment or two, against her, abusing her verbally, doubting her judgement, etc. even her friends and help (except maybe Mr. Contreras an odd character himself). It's like Paretsky likes to mount as much obstacles as possible for Vic to face.
The book has several interwoven chapters recovering the Lotty Herschel story that goes back to World War II, the Kindertransport, remorses and guilt. This chapters are great and probably the best in the book.
The thing I found a bit anoying comes from when Lotty feels, strangely treatened by Radbuka and behaves very irrationaly for hundreds of pages attacking and insulting V.I. Probably this isn't new for the V.I. frequent reader: Why does this woman stands that much abuse from a alleged friend? I assumed they were very close in other books, but Paretsky fails to convey that for the first time reader (something Sue Grafton always holds in mind). Vic says many times that she loves Lotty and so on but that didn't make it for me. Somehow Paretsky should have introduced the main characters as they show so their role, importance and oddities were understood.
If you never read a novel in this series you can find many open questions in the behavior of its characters. Its like if Paretsky is writing only for the regulars.

Not withstanding this little shortcomming, the book is engrossing. You are going to read it top to bottom (of course not in one sitting). And once you go beyond the first 100 pages a bit slow paced but I guess needed to set up the plot, and the first corpse is found, you are caught in the book. I won't spoil the book writing about a few contrived points in the resolution, but be assured I plan to read more of this series.

I couldn't say if its the best of them but it certainly is a good read.

Masterful Detective Story; Really Good Novel
I enjoyed this book from start to finish, couldn't put it down, didn't want it to end. Why can't I give it 10 stars?

V.I. Warshawski has become a mature woman with a realistic lovelife and real friends. It was a pleasure to spend time with her (although I'm worried she's going to starve to death; she never seems to eat anything). The complex insurance and "recovered memory" scam she is "detecting" was interesting and I never doubted any of it. Plenty of blood, gore, action and surprises. As usual I enjoyed the Chicago scenery, especially the occasional notes on the Cubs.

The story of Lotty, finally revealed after all this time, makes perfect sense. I always wondered what her "problem" was, as no doubt did Paretsky. I think Paretsky handled it well, revealing it as if Lotty is telling her the story, which in the end it turns out, she is.

Why do so many people think less of a book because it's a "mystery?" This is as good a novel as many pieces of "literature" I've read, and way better than some of those lyrical and tedious first novels reviewers go nuts over.

A V.I. NOVEL BUT LOTTY'S BOOK
As a mystery writer with my debut novel in its initial release, I have been enjoying Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski novels for years. I am glad she has resumed writing them, especially TOTAL RECALL. In many ways, TOTAL RECALL is Lotty Herschel's book. Lotty is V.I.'s friend and mentor. Lotty is the closest thing to a mother V.I. has. In several chapters, Lotty takes central stage and returns us to those horrible days of Holocaust. In time present, a man named Paul Radbuka has surfaced making startling claims regarding his conection to Lotty and her companion, Max. V.I. begins to investigate this man and his claims at the same time she is involved with an insurance investigation involving a black man named Aaron Sommers. As the story progresses, the reader learns much about Lotty, her past, and the horrors of Nazism. Ms. Paretsky also links Holocaust reparations to the issue of reparations for slavery. TOTAL RECALL is an excellent novel addressing some most serious themes. Excellent book.