SARA PARETSKY

This new series of Bookworms offers younger readers the chance to enjoy lively and accessible adaptations of the best classic and modern fiction. Each title is highly illustrated to engage the reader in the world of the book and help with specific vocabulary. Accompanying exercises make all these titles suitable for use in class or at home.

Chicago's unique brand of ball is sixteen-inch slow pitch, played in leagues all over the city for more than a century. But in politics, in business, and in law enforcement, the game is har

Victoria Warshawski es una investigadora privada que procede de los barrios del sur de Chicago, donde la inmigración, las drogas, los embarazos adolescentes y el absentismo escolar son una constante. Aquejada de cáncer, la entrenadora de baloncesto del instituto donde ella estudió le pide que asuma el control del equipo femenino, y Warshawski no puede negarse. El equipo está compuesto por adolescentes de minorías raciales, algunas de ellas con hijos, y todas procedentes de familias humildes. La mayoría de los padres de las chicas trabaja en By-Smart, una cadena de hipermercados que explota y discrimina a sus empleados.

'If Philippa Penhow hadn't gone to Bleeding Heart Square on that January day, you and perhaps everyone else might have lived happily ever after . . . ' It's 1934, and the decaying North London cul-de-sac of Bleeding Heart Square is an unlikely place of refuge for aristocratic Lydia Langstone. But as she flees her abusive marriage there is only one person she can turn to - the genteelly derelict Captain Ingleby-Lewis, currently lodging at no.7. However, unbeknown to Lydia, a dark mystery haunts 7 Bleeding Heart Square. What happened to Miss Penhow, the middle-aged spinster who owns the lodging house and who vanished four years earlier? Why is a seedy plain-clothes policeman obsessively watching the square? What is making struggling journalist Rory Wentwood so desperate to contact Miss Penhow? And why are parcels smelling of rotting meat being sent to Joseph Serridge, the last person to see Miss Penhow alive . . . ?

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of bestselling US author Sarah Paretsky's Killing Orders, starring Kathleen Turner as a feisty Chicago private eye VI Warshawski. Three million dollars in share certificates have been stolen from a Dominican priory and Vic Warshawski doesn't want to find out why. Aunt Rosa, the priory's treasurer, wants her on the case but Vic has never forgiven Rosa for something she did a long time ago.

La detective Victoria Warshawski, mujer independiente, solitaria, aparentemente dura e incapaz de ordenar su vida doméstica y sentimental, vuelve a hacerse cargo de la causa de los desheredados encarnada en dos de sus vecinos: una anciana que vive sola con sus perros y cuya presencia incomoda a los nuevos residentes del barrio y el entrañable señor Contreras, que le pide su ayuda para localizar a un antiguo compañero de trabajo desaparecido cuando hacia averiguaciones sobre las condiciones de jubilacion de la empresa en la que ambos trabajaban. En esta doble actividad, Warshawski se asomara a la problematica de los ancianos en una sociedad despiadada que no duda en aprovecharse de sus miembros mas desfavorecidos.

La investigadora privada V. I. Warshawski, experta en karate y tiradora mortal, es contratada por el vicepresidente de uno de los bancos más importantes de Chicago para que encuentre a la novia de su hijo Peter, misteriosamente desaparecida. Cuando le piden que abandone la investigacion, la detective se niega y halla una pista que la convierte en la principal enemiga de una peligrosa organizacion integrada por asesinos a sueldo y pistoleros sin escrupulos. Valor seguro es un thriller habil y refrescante, una inteligente combinacion de humor acido y suspense. Sara Paretsky, una de las escritoras de best-sellers de mayor exito de Estados Unidos, consigue atrapar al lector con un estilo agil y eficaz y una protagonista sencillamente irresistible.

Chicagos unique brand of ball is sixteen-inch slow pitch, played in leagues all over the city for more than a century. But in politics, in business, and in law enforcement, the game is hardball. Sara Paretsky is the author of thirteen previous books, including eleven V. I. Warshawski novels. She is the winner of many awards, including the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement from the British Crime Writers' Association.

The enigmatic performer known as the Body Artist takes the stage at Chicago's Club Gouge and allows her audience to use her naked body as a canvas for their impromptu illustrations. V. I. Warshawski watches as people step forward, some meek, some bold, to make their mark. The evening takes a strange turn when one woman's sketch triggers a violent outburst from a man at a nearby table. Quickly subdued, the man-an Iraqi war vet-leaves the club. Days later, the woman is shot outside the club. Sara Paretsky is a New York Times bestselling author.

When V.I. Warshawski is asked to find a man who's been missing for four decades, a search that she thought would be futile turns lethal. Old skeletons from the city's racially charged history rise up to force her back with a vengeance -- a nun who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. dies without revealing crucial evidence, and on the city's South Side, people spit when she shows up. The elderly sisters who hired her are also keeping important information to themselves. Then V.I. finds that her family is keeping secrets of their own. A young cousin whom she's never met arrives from Kansas City to work on a political campaign, but disappears under mysterious circumstances. Afraid to learn that her adored father might have been a bent cop, deception and corruption following her at every step, V.I. finds all her certainties under threat, but takes the investigation all the way to its frightening end.