Body Work

Sara Paretsky

Club Gouge: Chicago's edgiest night spot, where a woman calling herself the Body Artist invites the audience to use her naked body as a canvas.

The show attracts all kinds of people, from a menacing cop to Ukrainian mobsters and Iraq war veterans. A tormented young painter comes too, and the designs she creates on the Body Artist drive one of the soldiers into a violent rage.

When the painter is shot, the police assume the shell-shocked veteran went off the rails. But his family hires V.I. to clear his name - and the detective discovers a chain of ugly truths stretching from Iraq to Chicago's South Side