[.ca] Windy City Blues (ISBN 044021873X)

Worth reading if you're a die-hard fan:
Had Windy City Blues been the first V.I. Warshawski volume I'd read, I may have been disappointed. As it was, the characters were familiar, and I enjoyed the new format (even though I hope Ms. Paretsky sticks to V.I. novels in the future). The author owes her readers nothing, and is entitled to experiment with her popular character. If this is the first time you've read a V.I. Warshawski mystery, by all means, read the others!

Not Paretsky's best work, but not too bad either.:
The stories in "Windy City Blues," written throughout Ms. Paretsky's career as a novelist, are not up to her usual standard, but they are entertaining enough to be worth reading. It has been long enough since a new V.I. Warshawski novel was published (the last was "Tunnel Vision," 1994) that it just feels good to see these familiar characters again. But don't expect complicated plots: none of these mysteries taxes Vic's estimable deductive skill much.

Ripoff/Short Stories Disguised as Novel/Stories Inane:
The only clue on the front cover of this book that it is not a V.I. Warshwski novel is a single line reading "V.I. Warshawski Stories." Discovering that I'd paid $7.00 for short stories rather than a novel was a disappointment, and as I started the book, I discovered that the publisher had double spaced the text to make it appear that this was a normal length book. However, the biggest disappointments were the stories themselves. In the story entitled "The Pietro Andromache," the author stoops to gathering all of the suspects together in a room and cleverly solving the mystery! Adult characters in this awful story actually utter the lines "Yowie! Zowie! Powie!" and "Pooper snooper, pooper snooper." This is one of the most inane stories I've read in years! I have been a fan of this author for a long time, and have read all of the previous books in this series. This time I feel ripped off. I will probably not buy more books by this author.