This spunky mystery, the first in the V.I. Warshowski series by Paretsky, is the predecessor of books like the Stephanie Plum series and for that it deserves respect. Indemnity Only was written in 1990 though, and it does feel pretty dated at this point. I admired V.I.'s spirit and detemination, but her abrasive nature and her continual fight to prove herself in a man's world became overwhelming at times. I felt the second half of the book, with the introduction of Jill- a teen character who brings out the softer side of V.I., was stronger but all told the story was just average. 
 In addition, it didn't help that I read an ebook version of the story, which had a distracting number of mistakes, such as frequent lack of punctuation, random uses of italics, and sentences with words missing.