After more than 20 V. I. Warshawski novels, you might reasonably expect Sara Paretsky to stay comfortably in familiar territory. Instead, Bad Company introduces us to Lily, a retired CIA operative in her seventies whose knees and shoulders aren't what they used to be, but whose instincts remain alarmingly sharp.
And, I have to admit, Lily is terrific company.
When we first meet her, she is escaping through the window of a shabby Chicago hotel with two men apparently from the FBI close behind. She drops the last ten feet to the ground, hurts her hip and disappears among the homeless people sleeping in the park opposite. Before long she has changed her appearance completely, using the disguise skills acquired during four decades in intelligence work.
Why America's intelligence establishment is chasing one of its own former agents is the question that drives the novel.
The trouble begins innocently enough. Sitting in a doctor's waiting room, Lily opens a copy of The New Yorker that has mysteriously been sent to her. Inside is an article about Hayalistan, the fictional Central Asian country where she spent some of the most important years of her CIA career. The country lies between Russia and Afghanistan, close to Iran, and possesses something everybody wants: enormous mineral wealth.
Even more disturbing is a photograph showing the younger Lily taking part in a private ceremony with Hayali women. Someone took that photograph secretly decades earlier. Someone has now made certain she sees it. Lily starts asking questions, and that's when retirement becomes complicated.
Paretsky has always been interested in what happens when powerful institutions encounter ordinary people who refuse to behave themselves, and Bad Company is very much in that tradition. Here the world is bigger than V. I. Warshawski's Chicago investigations — CIA headquarters, international mining interests and the tangled politics of Central Asia all come into play — but Paretsky never loses sight of the people caught underneath them.
Lily herself is the book's greatest asset. She's highly capable without becoming one of those implausibly indestructible thriller heroes. Her body hurts. She's slower than she used to be. A disguise that once took seconds now takes longer. Retirement has left her restless and wondering what, exactly, remains when the career that defined her is suddenly taken away. Paretsky says the character began with the idea of an ageing investigator who still wants to perform physical heroics but discovers her body has other ideas.
That gives the book considerable humour as well as warmth. It also allows Paretsky to ask some uncomfortable questions about intelligence work. Lily believed she was serving her country. Looking back, however, she begins wondering whose interests were actually being served; particularly when the natural resources of a small country and the ambitions of extremely wealthy Americans become entangled.
Lithium is central to the story. Hayalistan possesses vast deposits, while American mining interests have profited enormously from access to them. The deeper Lily digs into events from her past, the less comfortable the picture becomes.
This isn't a conventional shoot-’em-up spy novel. There are pursuits, surveillance, disguises and genuine danger, but Paretsky is just as interested in office politics, sexism, corporate greed and the peculiar human talent for convincing ourselves that dubious actions are acceptable when they're performed in the national interest.
But Lily keeps pulling us along. She's clever, irritable, compassionate, stubborn and refreshingly unimpressed by authority. She is also surrounded by ordinary people whose problems matter to her, including Keira, a troubled Chicago teenager Lily has taken under her wing. That relationship prevents the larger geopolitical story from becoming impersonal.
Smart, angry, funny and unexpectedly moving, Bad Company proves that an ageing spy doesn't need to save the world to make a cracking thriller. Sometimes discovering what she really did for it is dangerous enough. A welcome addition to Sarah Paretksy’s ouvre.
