I suspect if I picked up this book today, without having spent much of the last twenty years waiting impatiently for each of Sara Paretsky’s new books, I’d find it over the top. VI starts off on a fairly minor missing person case and end up saving the world yet again. Well not quite, but not far off. This one concerns the altercations of a Chicago based computing giant that stretch back to Nazi-occupied Austria and I loved all the slightly wonky physics and computing stuff at the heart of the plot.

There’s a very odd ending device - where the book wraps up and then there are a few notes from the author and then we get taken back to the book for an “extra chapter”. I thought this was one of those “first chapter of the next book” teasers and nearly didn’t read it. I think it must be intended as a standalone short story as well as a coda to the book and it makes a rather odd, though not unpleasant, read when you read it straight through.

In short, nothing to put me off anticipating the next VI book, but not the place to start if you are new to the series!