BAD COMPANY

The title company isn’t PI V.I. Warshawski’s usual Chicago riffraff but the CIA, in a stand-alone thriller about an ex-agent who finds herself back on the hot seat.

Of all the places Lily Sedako worked during her 20 years as a field agent, the one she felt the most connection to was Hayalistan, a (fictional) country in the mountains of Central Asia. Driven from her post by the coup that toppled Rani, the Snow Leopard chief she’d helped install as the nation’s leader, she’s watched from afar as his successor, Agajan, has given free license to Gambrey Minerals and Mining to strip the land of its precious lithium. Now an anonymously sent copy of The New Yorker shows her a photograph she didn’t know existed, one that broadly hints she violated the tribal rituals of local women—and perhaps that her betrayal led to regime change as well. Determined to clear her name, Lily returns to Hayalistan, where she questions variously hostile former friends to see who might have sent that magazine and why. Apart from winning their confidence again, she has to protect herself from former boss Bruce Weyrich, CIA analytics chief Marissa Hockney, and Halina Roman, a young analytics assistant suddenly gone rogue—all on the way to seeing justice done for the Hayali people once and for all, or at least until the next spin of the wheel. Lily, who “had always been on the outside” of both Hayalistan and the Company, will remind fans of Warshawski on a global mission, and Paretsky handles the novel affordances of tradecraft with all the aplomb her protagonist lacks.

Most impressive not as an isolated achievement but as a demonstration of Paretsky’s unfailing range and ambition.