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Total Recall [A V.I. Warshawski Novel] [Secure Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/Adobe]
eBook by Sara Paretsky
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eBook Category: Suspense/Thriller/Mystery/Crime
eBook Description:  Sara Paretsky brings her incomparable storytelling brilliance to her most powerful Warshawski novel yet. Total Recall follows the Chicago P.I. on a road that winds back more than fifty years--and into an intricate maze of wartime lies, heartbreaking secrets, and harrowing retribution. For V.I., the journey begins with a national conference in downtown Chicago, where angry protesters are calling for the recovery of Holocaust assets. Replayed on the evening news is the scene of a slight man who has stood up at the conference to tell an astonishing story of a childhood shattered by the Holocaust--a story that has devastating consequences for V.I.'s cherished friend and mentor, Lotty Herschel. Lotty was a girl of nine when she emigrated from Austria to England, one of a group of children wrenched from their parents and saved from the Nazi terror just before the war broke out. Now stunningly--impossibly--it appears that someone from that long-lost past may have returned. With the help of a recovered-memory therapist, Paul Radbuka has recently learned his true identity. But is he who he claims to be? Or is he a cunning impostor who has usurped someone else's history ... a history Lotty has tried to forget for over fifty years? As a frightened V.I. watches her friend unravel, she sets out to help in the only way she can: by investigating Radbuka's past. Already working on a difficult case for a poor family cheated of their life insurance, she tries to balance Lotty's needs with her client's, only to find that both are spiraling into a whirlpool of international crime that stretches from Switzerland and Germany to Chicago's South Side. As the atrocities of the past reach out to engulf the living, V.I. struggles to decide whose memories of a terrible war she can trust, and moves closer to a chilling realization of the truth--a truth that almost destroys her oldest friend. With fierce emotional power, Sara Paretsky has woven a gripping and morally complex novel of crime and punishment, memory and illusion. Destined to become a suspense classic, Total Recall proves once again the daring and compelling genius of Sara Paretsky.
eBook Publisher: Random House, Inc., Published: 2002
Fictionwise Release Date: October 2002
This eBook is part of the following series:
Available eBook Formats [Secure Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/Adobe - What's this?]: SECURE MOBIPOCKET FORMAT [716 KB], SECURE MICROSOFT READER FORMAT [505 KB] - Requires Microsoft Reader 2.1.1 for PCs, or Microsoft Reader 2.2.2 on Pocket PC 2002 handheld devices. Some older Pocket PCs can be upgraded. Learn More., SECURE ADOBE FORMAT [1.3 MB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [844 KB]
Words: 125000
Reading time: 357-500 min.
Secure Adobe: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
eReader (recommended) ISBN: 0440334446
Microsoft Reader ISBN, Adobe Acrobat Reader ISBN, MobiPocket Reader ISBN: 9780440334446
 
"[A] master of the mystery format, Paretsky skillfully expands the form to tackle several convergent themes in a moving novel of discovery and redemption.... Dark, absorbing, probing--Paretsky's novel explores the complex web of degrees of guilt and complicity surrounding the fate of Holocaust victims and survivors, with Lotty's story emerging with compelling, terrible clarity and inevitability."--Publishers Weekly Starred Review
"... the most engaging woman in detective fiction."--Newsweek, "Sara Paretsky has no peer."--Chicago Tribune
Lotty Herschel's Story: Work Ethic The cold that winter ate into our bones. You can't imagine, living where you turn a dial and as much heat as you want glows from the radiator, but everything in England then was fueled by coal and there were terrible shortages the second winter after the war. Like everyone I had little piles of six-penny bits for the electric fire in my room, but even if I'd been able to afford to run it all night it didn't provide much warmth. One of the women in my lodgings got a length of parachute silk from her brother, who'd been in the RAF. We all made camisoles and knickers out of it. We all knew how to knit back then; I unraveled old sweaters to make scarves and vests -- new wool cost a fortune. We saw newsreels of American ships and planes bringing the Germans whatever they needed. While we swathed ourselves in blankets and sweaters and ate grey bread with butter substitutes, we joked bitterly that we'd done the wrong thing, bringing the Americans in to win the war -- they'd treat us better if we'd lost, the same woman who'd gotten the parachute silk said. Of course, I had started my medical training, so I couldn't spend much time wrapped up in bed. Anyway, I was glad to have the hospital to go to -- although the wards weren't warm, either: patients and sisters would huddle around the big stove in the center of the ward, drinking tea and telling stories -- we students used to envy their camaraderie. The sisters expected us medical students to behave professionally -- frankly, they enjoyed ordering us about. We'd do rounds with two pairs of stockings on, hoping the consultants wouldn't notice we wore gloves as we trailed after them from bed to bed, listening to symptoms that came from deprivation as much as anything. Working sixteen or eighteen hours a day without proper food took a toll on all of us. Many of my fellow students succumbed to tuberculosis and were granted leave -- the only reason the hospital would let you interrupt your training and come back, as a matter of fact, even though some took more than a year to recover. The new antibiotics were starting to come in, but they cost the earth and weren't yet widely available. When my turn came and I went to the Registrar, explaining that a family friend had a cottage in Somerset where I could recuperate, she nodded bleakly: we were already down five in my class, but she signed the forms for me and told me to write monthly. She stressed that she would hope to see me in under a year. In fact, I was gone eight months. I'd wanted to return sooner, but Claire -- Claire Tallmadge, who was a senior houseman by then, with a consultancy all but certain -- persuaded me I wasn't strong enough, although I was aching to get back. When I returned to the Royal Free it felt -- oh, so good. The hospital routine, my studies, they were like a balm, healing me. The Registrar actually called me into her office to warn me to slow down; they didn't want me to suffer a relapse. She didn't understand that work was my only salvation. I suppose it had already become my second skin. It's a narcotic, the oblivion overwork can bring you. Arbeit macht frei -- that was an obscene parody the Nazis thought up, but it is possible Arbeit macht betäubt -- what? Oh, sorry, I forgot you don't speak German. They had 1984-type slogans over the entrance to all their camps, and that was what they put over Auschwitz: work will make you free. That slogan was a bestial parody, but work can numb you. If you stop working even for a moment, everything inside you starts evaporating; soon you are so shapeless you can't move at all. At least, that was my fear. Copyright © 2001 by Sara Paretsky
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