Sara Paretsky: Hard Time (UK 2013)

From the Publisher:
While driving home after celebrating friend Murray Ryerson's big break into TV hosting, V.I. almost collides with a fatally wounded woman lying in the street.

The deceased is Nicola Aguinaldo, former employee of security giant B.B. Baladine and recent prison runaway. Taking on the case, V.I. finds herself plunged into a sinister network of corruption that pits her against the police, the prison and the entertainment industry - with potentially lethal results.

Sara Paretsky: Hard Time. Sometimes the only way out is to go in... Hodder, ISBN: 9781444761542 (February, 2013), 419 p., £8.99.

Sara Paretsky: Hard Time (USA 2000)

From the Publisher:
"An engrossing read." -- The Washington Post
"When it comes to creating character, evoking place, and writing crackling and convincing dialogue, Sara Paretsky has no peer -- and Hard Time proves it once again." -- Chicago Tribune

In an instant, the lives of two women collided. One was behind the wheel of a Trans Am she liked to drive too fast. The other was lying in the road, dying an agonizing death. When Chicago private eye V. I. Warshawski got out of her car to look at the woman she almost hit, she began a long, harrowing descent into a world of shady secrets and tangled lives -- and into the darkest heart of her city.

In her eagerly awaited new novel, which heralds the return of the much-loved heroine V. I. Warshawski, Sara Paretsky revisits the gritty urban landscape she illuminates with brilliant compassion and vivid color. For as V.I. unravels the mystery of a battered and discarded woman, she moves through circles of the rich and the troubled, into the bitter home of a powerful Chicago family, into the pampered world of a TV star, and behind the razor wire of a women's prison. What V.I. finds is a web of conspiracy -- and explosive secrets hidden in the darkest places of all...

"You'll feel handcuffed to this book until you've finished -- probably at 3 a.m." -- The Denver Post

Sara Paretsky: Hard Time. A V. I. Warshawski Novel. Dell Publishing, ISBN: 0440224705 (September, 2000), 495 p., $6.99.

Sara Paretsky: Hard Time (UK 2000)

From the Publisher:
When private investigator V. I. Warshawski swerves to avoid hitting a dying woman on a dark street, it is the beginning of her toughest challenge yet.

The woman is Nicola Aguinaldo, a runaway from women's prison Coolis, and ex-nanny for BB Baladine, the head of a large and powerful private security firm. When V. I. starts asking awkward questions about Nicola's death, she becomes the victim of an aggressive cover-up which brings her head-on with the police, the prison and corrupt big business, leaving her isolated from her allies and in more danger than ever before - even old friend and one-time lover journalist Murray Ryerson has sold his soul to the showbiz sharks at media empire Global Entertainment. V. I. is used to taking a bruising, but when she is arrested on a trumped-up charge and thrown into the lion's den at Coolis she faces her hardest time yet.

Sara Paretsky: Hard Time. Penguin, ISBN: 0140276726 (August, 2000), 419 p., £5.99.

Sara Paretsky: Hard Time (USA 1999)

From the Publisher:
Among the first, and perhaps the most compelling, female private investigators of contemporary fiction, Sara Paretsky's incomparable character V. I. Warshawski at last returns to the page in her first full-length appearance since 1994's Tunnel Vision. Hard Time is the work of a master--a riveting novel of suspense that is indisputably Paretsky's best V.I. Warshawski novel yet.

Multimedia conglomerate Global Entertainment has purchased the Chicago Herald-Star, forcing the paper's staff to scramble to stay employed. Reporter Murray Ryerson, V.I.'s longtime friend and sometime rival, manages to reinvent himself as the host of a television show on Global's network. On her way home from a party celebrating Murray's debut, V.I. almost runs over a woman lying in the street. Stopping to help, V.I. soon learns that her Good Samaritan act will drop her squarely in a boiling intrigue.

In a case that forces her to go head-to-head with one of the world's largest providers of private security and prison services, a case that exposes dark hidden truths behind the razzle-dazzle of the entertainment industry, V.I. will be ahead of the game if she gets out alive.

Sara Paretsky: Hard Time. A V.I. Warshawski Novel. Delacorte Press, ISBN: 0385313632 (September, 1999), 385 p., $24.95.