- A
Is for Alibi
Laurence Fife was a slick divorce lawyer and
slippery ladies' man. Until someone killed him.
The jury believed that it was his pretty young
wife Nikki, so they sent her to prison for eight
years. Now, Nikki's out on parole and Kinsey
Miihone's in for trouble. Nikki hires Kinsey to
discover who really killed her husband. But the
trail is eight years cold, and at the end is a
chilling twist even Kinsey doesn't suspect -- a
second eight-year-old murder and a brand new
corpse.
- B
Is for Burglar
Finding wealthy Elaine Boldt seems like a quickie
case to Kinsey Millhone. The flashy widow was
last seen wearing a $12,000 lynx coat, leaving
her condo in Santa Teresa for her condo in Boca
Raton. But somewhere in between, she vanished.
Kinsey's case goes from puzzling to sinister when
a house is torched, an apartment is burgled of
worthless papers, the lynx coat comes back
without Elaine, and her bridge partner is found
dead. Soon Kinsey's clues begin to form a capital
M -- not for missing, but for murder: and plenty
of it.
- C
Is for Corpse
Kinsey meets him in the local gym. Bobby Callahan
is a scarred young man struggling back to life
after a car forced his Porsche over the edge of a
canyon, battering his body and muddling his
memory. All he remembers is that someone, for
some reason, tried to kill him. Desperate for
clues about his own past life and certain he is
being stalked, he asks Kinsey to protect him.
Kinsey can't resist the brave kid - and neither
can the killers. Three days late Bobby is dead.
Kinsey Millhone never welshed on a deal. She'd
been hired to stop a killing. Now she'd find the
killer.
- D
Is for Deadbeat
The client came to Kinsey Millhone with an easy
job -- just deliver $25,000 to a fifteen-year-old
kid. A little odd, and a little too easy, but
Kinsey took Alvin Limardo's retainer check
anyway. It turned out to be as phony as he was.
In real life, his name was John Daggett, a
chronic drunk with a record as long as your arm
and a reputation for sleazy deals. But he wasn't
just a deadbeat. By the time Kinsey caught up
with him, he was a dead body -- with a whole host
of people who were delighted to hear the news.
But how do you make a stiff pay up what he owes
you?
- E
Is for Evidence
'E' is for evidence: evidence planted, evidence
lost. 'E' is for ex-lovers and evasions, enemies
and endings. For Kinsey, 'E' is for everything
she stands to lose if she can't exonerate
herself: her license, her livelihood, her good
name. And so she takes on a new client: namely,
Kinsey Millhone, thirty-two and twice divorced,
ex-cop and wisecracking loner, a California
private investigator with a penchant for lost
causes--one of which, it is to be hoped, is not
herself.
- F
Is for Fugitive
Everyone knew the kind of girl Jean Timberlake
was -- ask anybody in the sleepy surf town of
Floral Beach and they'd say Jean was wild,
looking for trouble. But she certainly wasn't
looking for murder. She was found dead on the
beach seventeen years ago, and a rowdy
ex-boyfriend named Bailey Fowler was convicted of
her murder and imprisoned -- and then Bailey
escaped. Now private eye Kinsey Millhone steps
into a case that should have never been closed,
in a town where there's no such thing as a
private investigation.
- G
Is for Gumshoe
Good and bad things seem to be coming in threes
for Kinsey Millhone: on her thirty-third birthday
she moves back into her renovated apartment, gets
hired to find an elderly lady supposedly living
in the Mojave Desert by herself, and makes the
top of ex-con Tyrone Patty's hit list. It's the
last that convinces Kinsey even she can't handle
whoever's been hired to whack her, and she gets
herself a bodyguard: Robert Dietz, a
Porsche-driving P.I. who takes guarding Kinsey's
body very seriously. With Dietz watching her for
the merest sign of her usual recklessness, Kinsey
plunges into her case. And before it's over,
she'll unearth the gruesome truth about a
long-buried betrayal and, in the process, come
fact-to-face with her own mortality.
- H
Is for Homicide
Any reader who needs a smart and sassy P.I. would
do well to hire Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone. .
. . H' is for Homicide continues to show the
author in strong storytelling form. . . . [It]
finds Kinsey Millhone working on a case involving
the death of a claims adjuster for a California
insurance company. The story takes her into the
Los Angeles barrio in pursuit of a violent
criminal, into jails and hospitals, and into a
grungy bar named the Meat Locker. . . . Count on
Millhone not only to corner the murderer but also
to make a statement against the foibles of the
insurance game."--The New York Times
- I
Is for Innocent
Fired by the insurance agency for whom she
investigates, Kinsey is forced to take on a
last-minute murder investigation in which the
ex-husband of a murdered artist claims that David
Barney, her current husband, is guilty as sin.
Barney gets to Kinsey and insists he's innocent.
But if he is, who's guilty? In trying to learn
who's been getting away with murder, Kinsey may
be courting her own.
- J
Is for Judgement
Wendell Jaffe has been dead for five years--until
his former insurance agent spots him in a dusty
resort bar. Now California Fidelity wants Kinsey
Millhone to track down the dead man. Just two
months before, his widow collected on Jaffe's
$500,000 life insurance policy--her only legacy
since Jaffe went overboard, bankrupt and about to
be indicted for his fraudulent real estate
schemes. As Kinsey pushes deeper into the mystery
surrounding Wendell Jaffe's pseudocide, she
explores her own past, discovering that in family
matters, as in crime, sometimes it's better to
reserve judgment.
- K
Is for Killer
When Kinsey Millhone answers her office door late
one night, she lets in more darkness than she
realizes. Janice Kepler is a grieving mother who
can't let the death of her beautiful daughter
Lorna alone. The police agree that Lorna was
murdered, but a suspect was never apprehended and
the trail is now ten months cold. Kinsey pieces
together Lorna's young life: a dull day job a the
local water treatment plant spiced by sidelines
in prostitution and pornography. She tangles with
Lorna's friends: a local late-night DJ; a sweet,
funny teenaged hooker; Lorna's sloppy landlord
and his exotic wife. But to find out which one,
if any, turned killer, Kinsey will have to
inhabit a netherworld from which she may never
return.
- L
Is for Lawless
When Kinsey Millhone agrees to do a favor for
Henry Pitts, her lovable octogenarian landlord,
she literally gets taken for the ride of her
life. The family of a recently deceased WWII
veteran wants her to find out why the military
has no record of his service. All Kinsey has to
do, she thinks, is cut through some government
red tape. But when the dead man's house is
ransacked and his old army buddy is beaten up,
she quickly realizes he was not all he seemed.
Before long Kinsey is trailing crooks halfway
across the country, impersonating a hotel maid,
tangling with a baseball bat-wielding
grandmother, and running from one very dangerous
character. With her money almost gone and her
nerves frayed, Kinsey's got to solve a
decades-old crime and make it back home in time
for Henry's wedding . . . if she can make it back
at all.
- M
Is for Malice
Kinsey Millhone, the normally bubbly California
private investigator, is depressed in Sue
Grafton's new alphabet mystery; so depressed she
goes back with old flame Robert Dietz for a
while. Bad move. Meanwhile she gets wrapped up in
a family affair, locating the missing heir to a
fortune and then protecting him from his
ill-intentioned brothers. Typically, our woman
Kinsey has little patience with the boys, but a
firm grasp of family dysfunction.
- N
Is for Noose
She heads off to meet Dietz's former client, Mrs.
Selma Newquist, a devastated widow whose makeup
tips seem to come from Tammy Faye Baker. Her
husband Tom Newquist, a detective himself, had
been working on a mysterious case when he
abruptly died of a heart attack. Selma suspects
foul play, but bless her, she isn't the brightest
star in the sky and can't figure out what Tom was
working on even though he's left behind enough
paper to fill a recycling truck. Kinsey digs
right in and roams the sleepy, one-horse town of
Nota Lake for clues, interviewing a colorful cast
of in-laws and locals. Beneath the quaint, quiet,
country veneer, she unearths a bubbling hotbed of
internal strife and familial double-dealing.
- O
is for Outlaw
Wise-cracking, staunchly independent, and
chronically curious, Grafton's gritty gumshoe
Kinsey Millhone is back. This time, the alphabet
series star will take on the toughest case to
date: her past. What begins as a random phone
call from a "storage space scavenger"
(someone who buys the contents of defaulted
storage units) leads Kinsey to a box of old
papers and personal effects that her ex-husband,
Mickey Magruder, left behind. Inside, she finds a
15-year-old unsent letter from a bartender that,
among other things, reveals her former hubby was
having an affair. The letter also contains
details about the murder of a transient--a crime
for which Mickey was blamed. Although never
convicted, Mickey was ruined--losing his job,
wife, and friends. But 15 years later, Kinsey
realizes that foul play may have been involved in
the murder, a deadly temptation for her.
- P
is for Peril
When Dowan
Purcell, a respected physician who operates a nursing home,
disappears, his ex-wife hires Santa Teresa PI Kinsey Millhone to
look into it. Fiona Purcell is still seething over Dow's affair
and subsequent marriage to Crystal, a former stripper, yet they're
still friends, and she seems worried. But when his body is
discovered, she's among the suspects. Both of Dow's wives, at
least one of his business partners, and perhaps even Crystal's
teenage daughter had motives to kill. While in her most recent
adventures Kinsey has
acquired new digs, an extended family, and a few more gray hairs,
in this one (which takes place some time in the mid-'80s), she's
36, still living in the remodeled garage that was blown up in an
earlier novel. Easier than a facelift, and while Sue Grafton is a
solid enough writer to pull it off, dedicated Kinsey fans will
miss the more complex and multidimensional character who aged so
ruefully and interestingly in the '90s. This isn't Grafton's
strongest case; it's hard to care about any of Purcell's women or
his associates. More exciting is the secondary plot, which
involves a handsome landlord who offers Kinsey the new office
space she's been seeking and turns out to be a lot more trouble
than she bargained for. Despite its somewhat plodding pace and the
echo of a more evolved heroine that rings through its pages,
Grafton's many fans will probably shoot P Is for Peril
right to the top of the bestseller list.
-
Q is for Quarry
Private investigator
Kinsey Millhone has served Sue Grafton well through 16 letters of
the alphabet in a perennially popular
series that occasionally breaks new ground but more often
traverses familiar territory, as is the case here. Two old, ailing
cops--one retired, the other disabled--try to breathe some life
into an 18-year-old mystery that haunts them both for different
reasons. They enlist Kinsey's help in identifying the victim, a
young woman who was murdered and left for dead in the old quarry
of the title. Neither they nor Kinsey expect that reopening an old
case will incite the killer to strike again--not once, but twice.
And while the real case of the still-unidentified victim that
inspired this fictionalized scenario continues to languish in the
cold case file in the Santa Barbara sheriff's office, Grafton's
solution is as plausible as any. While the unlikely trio of
Millhone and her cranky geezer sidekicks offers a few chuckles,
the inner reaches of Kinsey's soul remain largely inaccessible to
her as well as to the reader, which will probably not bother most
of Kinsey's or Grafton's many admirers.
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