Introducing Former Spy Lily Sedako
Widely acclaimed for her mystery series starring intrepid female private eye V.I. Warshawski, Sara Paretsky has created a new character in a spy thriller titled BAD COMPANY, featuring the aging heroine Lily Sedako, an audacious retired CIA field agent. Paretsky will be at the library on November 17 to talk about this new book. I hope you’ll join me in welcoming Sara Paretsky and her bold, yet fallible seventy-something former-spy protagonist with a strong social conscience!
Paretsky's Lawrence Connection & Award-Winning Career
In case you aren't familiar with celebrated author Sara Paretsky, she grew up in Lawrence, but now lives in Chicago. Her writing has earned both the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. Indemnity Only was her debut, the first in the mystery series featuring Chicago private eye V.I. Warshawski. The latest in the series is Pay Dirt, published in 2024.
What is Bad Company About?
There is adventure in the opening chapters of Bad Company that never slows down throughout the story. As Lily expresses empathy with Chicago's most vulnerable, including a loose-knit community of house-less people living in public parks, they watch as she escapes FBI capture by dropping from a rope dangling outside the window of a tall building.
The intrepid Lily volunteers as a mentor with a youth theater program and uses her excellent language skills to support Ukrainian students, but she is compelled out of retirement and forced to walk away from these at-risk teens. She’s received an anonymous package: a copy of a two-year old New Yorker magazine featuring a scathing article that has personally indicted her for ecological and political devastation in the central Asian country where she spent the bulk of her CIA career. Paretsky invented a fictional country named Hayalistan, a former USSR territory. Lily vibrates with mournful devotion for the people, their culture, and mountain landscape. She must return to try to heal the broken bonds with the women artists who were like sisters, and discover who has named Lily in the tangled conspiracy of greed and environmental destruction the Hayali people are suffering. Despite the gripping suspense of this story, Bad Company includes many laugh-out-loud moments, and Lily is charming with her plain-spoken thoughts on injustices.
I gleaned from listening to Paretsky in conversation on an episode of the Spybrary podcast that her background material for Bad Company included a wide range of works to enhance the authenticity of her heroine’s adventures, including:
If you are as excited as we to have her speak at the library, register now for An Evening with Sara Paretsky!
—Shirley Braunlich is an Adult Services Assistant at Lawrence Public Library.
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