FREE: Fire Sale

The listing, Fire Sale has ended.

This is a hard cover book used in good shape.

"V. I. Warshawski may have left her old South Chicago neighborhood, but as she learns, she cannot escape it. When she takes over coaching duties of the girls' basketball team at her former high school, the detective faces an ill-equipped, ragtag group of gang-bangers, fundamentalists, and teenage moms who inevitably draw her into their family woes." "Through Josie, one of the basketball players, V. I. meets her mother, Ms. Dorrado, who voices her worries about sabotage in the little flag-manufacturing plant where she works. The largest employer on the South Side, discount-store behemoth By-Smart, pays even less than the flag plant, and Ms. Dorrado doesn't know how she'll support her four children if the plant shuts down." "Her fears are realized when the plant explodes; V. I. is injured and the owner is killed. As V. I. begins to investigate, she finds herself confronting the family that owns By-Smart. Founder William "Buffalo Bill" Bysen, now in his eighties, has four sons, who quarrel with one another and with him; the oldest, "Young Mr. William," who is close to sixty, is furious that his father doesn't cede more power to him. And then there's "Billy the Kid," young Mr. William's nineteen-year-old son, whose Christian idealism puts him on a collision course with his father, his grandfather, and the company as a whole." When Billy runs away with Josie Dorrado, V. I. is squeezed between the needs of two very different families. As she tries to find the errant teenagers, and to track down a particularly cruel murderer, her own life is almost forfeited in the swamps that lie beneath the city of Chicago.