Chicago Authors Build Legacy of Suspense

Love reading on the edge of your seat? Let's take a look at two authors sure to keep you there: Sara Paretsky and Scott Turow. These bestselling and prolific authors both call the Chicago area home.

We’re grateful for their participation in this year’s Carl Sandburg Literary Awards Dinner, held by the Chicago Public Library Foundation on October 21 at The Forum at UIC.

Sara Paretsky

Paretsky began her writing career while working as a marketing professional at CNA Insurance, which has led to mysteries set in the finance and insurance industries. But her books are best known for their strong female lead, V.I. Warshawski, whose name is synonymous with Paretsky's.

The private investigator in the V.I. Warshawski series came to life in Paretsky's debut novel, Indemnity Only, and later appeared on the big screen in V.I. Warshawski, which features the character but isn't based on a specific book.

Indemnity Only is available in other formats.

Warshawski's latest appearance, in Brush Back published this summer, explores the character's past—and Chicago's—as the PI digs into a decades-old case on the South Side. In a starred review, Booklist called Warshawski "as intrepid and tenacious as she was in the series' first novels."

Brush Back is available in other formats.

In Writing in An Age of Silence, a collection of essays, Paretsky gives insight into Warshawski and her own life as she discusses her childhood, her involvement in the civil rights and feminist movements, her political views and her work.

Scott Turow

Like Paretsky, Turow began his writing career while working in a career that shaped his books: The Harvard Law School graduate is a former prosecutor. The legacy of his background? Legal thrillers packed with dramatic courtroom scenes, legal complexities and controversies, and very human characters.

Turow broke out with Presumed Innocent, where prosecutor Rusty Sabich is both investigator and suspect in the murder of a colleague. The film adaptation, Presumed Innocent, stars Harrison Ford.

Presumed Innocent is available in other formats.

The Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote that Turow's third novel, Pleading Guilty, showed he's "worthy to be ranked with Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler."

Pleading Guilty is available in other formats.

In addition to legal thrillers, Turow is the author of Ordinary Heroes, which follows a character from Presumed Innocent as he unravels the shocking family secret of his father's actions during World War II, and the nonfiction Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty.