Sarah Paretsky. Indemnity Only (1982) Searching for a missing young woman, V. I Warshawski stumbles onto a murder, and eventually links it to a scheme to use a trust account to deposit fraudulent workmen’s compensation claims. A crooked insurance excusive, a crooked banker, a crooked but naive union boss, a too-good-to-be-true young woman of 14, Chicago’s upper crust and its warts, and other such things mark this book as an adventure romance of the knight errant type. Vic is the knight, Chicago is the murky forest, the crooked executive is the dragon, the mob supplies various monsters, the young women are the princess, and of course there’s the treasure, a man’s soul.
Nicely done, the book supplies a few hours of more or less innocent entertainment. Another of those books that would make a good TV series, but now original material in the same genre has supplanted adaptations. Pity. **½
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