Bad Company

The CIA forced Lily to retire before she was ready. She’d spent forty years as a field agent. She’d been skilled, resourceful, dedicated – everything that makes a good agent, but she’d rubbed too many of her bosses the wrong way. They jumped on a botched op as an excuse to fire her. Now in her seventies, waiting in a doctor’s office, she reads a magazine article that startles her out of retirement.

The story casts doubt on everything she believed about her first – and happiest – posting in Hayalistan, one of the old Soviet republics. Lily’s angry, and she decides to find out what really happened when she was stationed there. As word of her investigation gets back to the CIA, the Company knows they must silence her. But Lily’s aging body can’t perform the feats it managed in her forties and fifties, and escaping their attempts on her life will test her physical and mental skills at a whole new level.

• Called a "genius" by Lee Child and "one of the all time greats" by Karin Slaughter, Sara Paretsky transformed the role of women in the mystery world with her detective V I Warshawski.Sara Paretsky is a bestseller across Europe and in 2025 she reached number 3 on the German bestseller list and her tour sold out
• Paretsky's new protagonist is a heroine for modern times, a woman in her 70s refusing to back down in the face of injustice both personal and instutional, and this time with a wider global reach

"Bad Company" was written by Sara Paretsky.