Hardball

The New York Times - Marilyn Stasio: The thing about Sara Paretsky is, she's tough?not because she observes the bone-breaker conventions of the private-eye genre but because she doesn't flinch from examining old social injustices others might find too shameful (and too painful) to dig up?While her themes here are familiar?she gives them a personal spin by drawing on her own experiences as a community organizer during the summer of 1966 and sharing them with a large cast of voluble and opinionated characters, whose memories are as raw as her own. There's a real sting to both the anger of a black man who took care of a friend beaten to insensibility by racist cops and the grief of an old white woman displaced from her family home. Voices like these can ring in your ears for?oh, 40 years and more.