Book Summary and Reviews of Bad Company by Sara Paretsky

Bad Company by Sara Paretsky

Bad Company

A Novel

by Sara Paretsky

  • Publishes:
  • Nov 10, 2026, 416 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

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.

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This information about Bad Company was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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More Information

Hailed by the Washington Post as "the definition of perfection in the genre," Sara Paretsky is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous novels, including the renowned V.I. Warshawski series. She is one of only four living writers to have received both the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. She lives in Chicago.

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