Sara Paretsky: Bad Company (UK 2026)

From the Publisher:
The CIA forced Lily to retire before she was ready. She'd spent 40 years as a field agent. She'd been skilled, resourceful, dedicated - everything that makes a good agent, but she'd rubbed too many of her bosses the wrong way. They jumped on a botched op as an excuse to fire her. Now in her 70's, waiting in a doctor's office, she reads a magazine article that startles her out of retirement. The story casts doubt on everything she believed about her first - and happiest - posting in Hayalistan, one of the old Soviet republics. Lily's angry, and she decides to find out what really happened when she was stationed there. As word of her investigation gets back to the CIA, the Company knows they must silence her. But Lily's aging body can't perform the feats it managed in her 40's and 50's, and escaping their attempts on her life will test her physical and mental skills at a whole new level.

Sara Paretsky: Bad Company. A Novel. No Exit Press, ISBN: 9781835011775 (September, 2026), 320 S., £20.00, eBook £11.99.

Sara Paretsky: Bad Company (USA 2026)

From the Publisher:
International bestseller and groundbreaking icon Sara Paretsky returns with a brand new novel and character - proving once again that she's one of the pre-eminent authors in crime fiction and beyond.

To all appearances, Lily Sedako is an unexceptional retiree - a seventy-something single woman living in Chicago, her days filled with the routine tasks of normal life. But underneath that exterior, lies a remarkable past. A former CIA field agent, she spent her career in various Central Asian countries, but most notably in Hayalistan, a former USSR territory. But everything went sideways when Lily's connections to the mountain tribes resulted in her being moved to a new post and Rani, the tribal leader and first democratically elected President was removed, presumed killed, in a coup back in 2002.

All of this is long behind her when she receives an anonymous package containing a magazine with an article about Hayalistan - an article with a previously unknown photo showing Lily in the background. This was no mistake - someone out there is trying to expose Lily, after more than two decades, for reasons unknown.

Lily, however, is no one's pawn even now. Determined to find out who is behind this, how they obtained these forbidden photos, and what their goal is before she is a casualty in someone else's scheme.

Using hard won skills and personal connections from her former life, Lily is determined to unravel the machinations going on now and what really happened back in Hayalstan more than twenty years ago.

In a powerful novel about love, power, corruption, aging, trust... and revenge, Bad Company reaffirms Sara Paretsky place as one of the pre-eminent crime writers of our time.

Sara Paretsky: Bad Company. A Novel. Minotaur Books, ISBN: 9781250412195 (September, 2026), 400 S., $30.00, eBook $14.99.