SOURCE: “Going for the Heart,” in Times Literary Supplement, October 20, 1995, p. 24.

In the following excerpt, Cooper complains that Paretsky allows ideas to take presidence over all else in the short stories of V. I. for Short.

There are several traps in the path of crime writers who develop a detective through a series of novels. The most obvious is the formula that becomes boring for both writer and reader. A less simple but perhaps more dangerous snare awaits novelists who avoid the first by dealing ever more seriously with the evil about which they are writing. …

In V. I. for Short, Sara Paretsky has produced a collection of stories written between 1983 and 1992. Necessarily slight, but attractive, they have backgrounds ranging from a regular weekly Go party held by some Japanese neighbours of the Chicago private eye, V. I. Warshawski, to an expensive beauty parlour; from the practice courts...