Memories playing tricks

Fans of VI Warshawski, Sara Paretsky's Chicago PI, will be well-acquainted with the irascible and eccentric Dr Lotty Herschel, Warshawski's oldest and closest friend and mentor, a reliable provider of chicken soup and comfort in times of need.

Born in Vienna, as a nine-year-old, Lotty was sent to England with a group of other children just before the beginning of the Second World War. She had believed her family and all the members of the circle in which it moved had perished in the Holocaust. She is astounded, therefore, when a man claims on television that, with the help of a recovered-memory therapist, he has discovered that he is Jewish, spent the war in a concentration camp, and that his real name is not Ulrich, but Radbuka - a name with very close connections to Lotty's family.

Suspicious, she asks Warshawski to look into Radbuka's history: a task which, Warshawski discovers, dovetails neatly with an investigation into the Ajax insurance company.

Total Recall is not Sara Paretsky's best detective story: too many sub-plots are fighting one another for existence, and Warshawski is unbelievably slow in catching on to an obvious clue which solves most of the mystery. However, she has at least got over the annoying habit of not being able to, say, blow her nose without checking the tissue for political correctness. Indeed, there's a welcome dry satire in the treatment of recovered-memory syndrome, of a campaign to bar insurance companies from doing business in Illinois unless they can prove they do not possess assets of Holocaust victims, and of a similar campaign to bar businesses from the state if they profited from slavery - unless they pay restitution, of course.

But, though this may not be her best detective story, it is possibly her best novel: more complex, more emotionally satisfying, and cutting deeper into life than previous works.