Opening paragraphs...................

     "Going back to South Chicago has always felt to me like
a return to death.  The people I loved most, those fierce first
attachments of childhood, had all died in this abandoned
neighborhood on the City's southeast edge.  It's true my
mother's body, my father's ashes, lie elsewhere, but I had
tended both through painful illnesses down here.  My cousin
Boom-Boom, close as a brother - closer than a brother - had
been murdered here fifteen years ago.  In my nightmares,
yellow smoke from the steel mills still clouds my eyes, but
the giant smokestacks that towered over my childhood
landscape are now only ghosts themselves."

Sara Paretsky, Fire Sale