Ghost Country [Hardcover]

It's not a mystery. It's about a Goddess returning into urban American life, and the chaos that ensues.

As a reader familiar with SFF, I found this story original, well-written, well-characterized and engaging. It draws the reader in and offers both intellectual and emotional interest.

Paretsky fans who are able to step beyond the familiar mystery milieu, and who aren't afraid of a little sensuality, have a treat to read here--and I don't hesitate to recommend the book to anyone.

The book plot is a compilcated mix of personalities, events and social institutions and their effects on each other.

I will recommed it to my book group because Ms. Paratsky has written a book that requires the reader to think and question. The questions are not easy and the answers even harder. But my book group is an interesting mix of intelligent thinking women who stretch each other to move out of our comfortable thinking ruts.

I hope that Ms. Paratsky continues to write about V.I., but that GHOST COUNTRY is followed by books that will stay in my mind and cause me to question what I believe and how I react toward others and the part I play in all I do.

It is not a "pleasant" story. She is not Clyde Edgerton in WALKING ACROSS EGYPT, asking what is the role of the Church, what do young people need to be sucessful adults, what gives adults a state of grace. Instead Ms. Paretsky colors her story with some disturbing images, but she is not without hope and redemption.

Still set in Chicago, Paretsky weaves an urban fable around the most unlikely heroines; the homeless, "mad" and dispossessed. We all know about homeless people, but do we have any idea how they get that way? How can an unquenchable craving for alcohol bring a world famous operatic diva onto the streets with her hardly noticing? It seems incredible to me, but I have never experienced that thirst. Why do the withheld histories of her mother and grandmother cause a young woman to construct alternative lives for them and go looking for them? I don't know - I'm sure we don't have such secrets in my family. How can someone see rusty water leaking from a crack in a wall, and see the blood of the Virgin Mary? I don't know - I don't have that sort of faith.

Then there are those who help. What is help? Is the shelter provided by Hagar House really help, with all the miles of strings attached in the name of some sort of self-serving Christianity. Does the hospital really provide help, with the dispensation of drugs and 15 minute psychiatric sessions?

The supposedly normal people are also a mass of confliction. The golden girl, freezing her emotions down deep while striving relentlessly for the approval of a domineering grandfather. The domineering grandfather, treated as a god by the hospital and by a manipulative housekeeper. The idealistic, young psychiatrist, still naïve enough to put concern for patients ahead of concern for the hospital. The hellfire and brimstone preaching lay brother, with his abused, repressed and cowered daughter, and bully of a son. The large hotel, owners of the wall worshipped by the homeless women and the lengths they are prepared to go to get rid of them.

But then the story takes a fantasy turn, and unfortunately gets lost. A mysteriously erotic, unintelligible woman named Starr enters, and manages to heal everyone's afflictions and punish the manipulators. With her Medusa-like hairstyle, is she a reincarnated Sumarian goddess, or a female Christ? Well, what she is, is a cop-out. I was appalled to find this story that had provoked my thoughts and held me spell-bound for many pages, suddenly turned into a silly little fantasy. The introduction of this character was completely unnecessary - a writer of Paretsky's proven skill resorting to such artifice to resolve a skilfully constructed set-up is extremely disappointing.

Still, I found quite a bit of food for thought in this book. How precariously many of us totter on the precipice, how tiny the nudge to send us spinning out of control. What then?