Pay Dirt

Chicago PI V.I. Warshawski hasn’t been herself since one of her cases ended in tragedy. Friends persuade her to head to Kansas for a college basketball game featuring her protégée Angela. When Angela’s housemate Sabrina goes missing, V.I. reluctantly agrees to help search for the young woman. With no support network in Lawrence, and the police suspicious of her motives, V.I. finally finds Sabrina almost dead in a drug den on Yancy Hill. It gets worse: the FBI shows up to question V.I. about kidnapping the girl, and the police don’t believe her. When V.I. returns to the drug house, she finds the body of a woman who had been stirring up trouble in town. Now V.I. is suspected of kidnapping and murder, and she only has two junk men and an ambitious young reporter to turn to for help. As V.I. investigates the death, she finds evidence that connects the land around Yancy Hill with Lawrence’s industrial future and Kansas’s bloody past before the Civil War.