'Fire Sale' burns with righteous anger

Fire Sale, By Sara Paretsky, Putnam, 416 pp., $25.95

In ''Fire Sale," Sara Paretsky's 12th V.I. Warshawski mystery, the Polish-Italian private investigator softens but doesn't mellow. V.I. has lost some of her sharp edges but none of her righteous anger.

The primary target of that anger is By-Smart (a thinly disguised Wal-Mart), but V.I. takes some powerful jabs along the way at misguided moralists who turn a blind eye to the consequences of teenage pregnancy, jaded school administrators who offer little and expect less of the students in their charge, and one particularly voyeuristic journalist who sees hardscrabble lives as a source of entertainment and cheap thrills. The fact that this journalist is an especially attractive, charismatic colleague and temporary roommate of V.I.'s lover, Morrell, adds a little old-fashioned jealousy and new-fashioned insecurity to V.I's persona, making her that much more interesting.

The book opens in south Chicago, where V.I. has reluctantly returned as a favor to her ailing high school basketball coach to temporarily take over the reins of the team until a replacement can be found. In a quest for corporate sponsorship, she turns to By-Smart, whose regional distribution center has become the biggest (and almost only) employer in the neighborhood since the death of the local steel industry. Taking By-Smart's claims of faith-based community service at face value, she turns to the company's owners, evangelical Christian ''Buffalo Bill" Bysen and his predictably sanctimonious, bickering offspring. Grandson ''Billy the Kid" is the exception to this family rule, an idealistic 19-year-old who is working in the warehouse to learn the business from the ground up. He is also expanding his horizons by singing in the choir of a local church led by Pastor Andres, a part-time electrician and full-time evangelist who believes that self-proclaimed pious Christians like Buffalo Bill should put their money where their mouths are.

V.I. is drawn not only into the lives of her Polish and Mexican-American players, but into a sabotage investigation at a small local flag manufacturer, a company that provides one of the few (and better-paying) alternatives to working at By-Smart and, not coincidentally, supplies products to the retail giant. As important, she is drawn back into the social orbit of some schoolmates from her youth who forcefully remind her of where she came from and what she fled.

V.I.'s return to the landscape of her youth isn't sentimental. She is appalled at the meanness of the environment, resentful at having to return to it, and angry at the smallness of the vision it breeds. Most of her players live lives that have ended before they've begun, and for this, V.I. blames their parents and teachers and priests every bit as much as the literal and metaphorical swampland that surrounds them.

In ''Fire Sale," as in her past three books, Paretsky shows increasing mastery of the mystery as a vehicle for social criticism. She exposes religious hypocrisy and the politely brutal, well-hidden reality of the captains of capital and the working poor they command. While the plot relies a little too heavily on coincidence, it moves well. And V.I. -- now more reflective and less defensive, more vulnerable but less brittle, more committed and less certain -- moves pretty darn well herself.