Y is for Yesterday by Sue Grafton: A review

We're coming to the end of Sue Grafton's alphabet mystery series; only Z to go after this one.

I've been reading these books since the start, way back in the early '80s, and it's been an uneven ride as it often is with long-running series, but I've stuck with it because that's what I do and because I have a vast reservoir of affection for Grafton's Kinsey Millhone.

In this one, Grafton again takes us back to the '80s when Kinsey was in her 30s. She gives us a two-pronged mystery. One prong involves the psychopathic serial killer from the last book and the other takes us back ten years to 1979 and a group of the most obnoxious and unlikable teenagers you are ever likely to encounter.

The psychopathic killer from the X book is still on the loose and is a threat to society and to Kinsey who tried to put him away, as well as to two women who were formerly in his life. He's come back to Santa Teresa to try to tie up all those dangling loose ends, one of which is named Kinsey Millhone.

Meanwhile, while worrying over her own safety, Kinsey is hired to look into an extortion scheme. Back in 1979, that unsavory group of teenagers had been involved in some truly awful stuff - bullying, sexual assault, a porn tape of a drugged girl being assaulted by three boys, and finally murder. Two of them had served time in prison for the murder, but they were juveniles when convicted and both are now out in 1989, the second one, Fritz, only recently released. 

It's Fritz's mother who has hired Kinsey, because someone is trying to extort $25,000 from them, threatening to take the porn tape, in which Fritz is prominently featured, to the D.A. He could easily land back in prison once again.

Kinsey goes about her investigation in her usual organized and workmanlike fashion, while also keeping an eye out for the psychopath and trying to negotiate tricky social interactions involving her cousin Anna who is now living in Santa Teresa and two of her former lovers, as well as two street people and a giant dog camping out in her landlord's backyard. It's enough to make the hardiest private investigator tired.

This plot made me a bit tired as well. As the series winds down, it has lost a bit of its oomph. There are few surprises anymore. Moreover, the book seemed unnecessarily long with a lot of repetitious padding. I think it could have been substantially improved by more rigorous editing.

All that being said, I do love Kinsey Millhone and I will follow her in her adventures right up to the end of the alphabet.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

    

X by Sue Grafton: A review

X by Sue Grafton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Picking up a book by Sue Grafton is always a relaxing experience. You know you are in the hands of a master, so you can just lean back and let the experience of the book flow over you.

X, the 24th in the Kinsey Milhone series, certainly continues the Grafton experience, although this book has a much darker story to tell than many of the others in the series. In this one, Kinsey comes up against a very scary sociopath, who, it turns out, has had a long career of serial murders of young women (of course). His crimes have gone completely undetected, and, even though the villain is identified early in the book, the problem for Kinsey becomes whether or not she can find the evidence to prove his guilt before she becomes his next victim.

Once again, we are back in 1988 and it is interesting to see Kinsey trying to find a payphone to call her landlord Henry or to make other calls. There is now a whole generation of readers who will not even remember such anachronisms, but for those of us who lived through those times, it's just a bit of nostalgia.

In addition to Kinsey's stalking of the sociopath, she has a mystery to solve closer to home. California is in the middle of one of its periodic droughts and water rationing is a very real possibility. Diligent citizens, like Kinsey's landlord Henry Pitts, are making every effort to control their water usage, but in spite of his and Kinsey's efforts, his bills keep rising. He calls in plumbers to check for leaks and to recommend actions and one of them discovers the source of the problem: the next-door neighbors.

An elderly couple has moved in next door after the old neighbors moved to the East. They give the impression that they have bought the house, but a bit of investigation by Kinsey reveals that, in fact, they are squatters. Furthermore, they are stealing Henry's water!

Actually, I found this subplot very entertaining. I always enjoy the Kinsey and Henry interactions. Henry and his whole family are such charming characters.

I have been reading these books since the first one (A is for Alibi) came out in 1982, so Kinsey Millhone is one of my oldest and most enduring literary friends. I always enjoy a visit with her and I read the new books as soon as I can after publication. This one was not the best of the lot, but it rated pretty highly with me. The villain was creepy and scary and, sadly, quite believable, and Kinsey's stubborn determination to bring him to justice was altogether true to the Kinsey Millhone I've come to know over the years.

The ending was frustrating, but, again, it was believable. There was no magic wand waving to make everything fall into place and justice prevail. In this, it was without question true to life.


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W is for Wasted by Sue Grafton: A review

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The first few pages of this new Sue Grafton book grabbed me, and I looked forward to one of her typically interesting and entertaining reads. But the further I progressed with my reading, the more antsy I got. The story just didn't seem very coherent. It wandered here and there to no discernible purpose. Words, sentences, whole paragraphs seemed thrown in just to increase the word count and didn't appear to this reader to be advancing the story or making the characters' actions more explicable. In the end, I concluded that W is for wordy. Too wordy by far.

I've been reading these Kinsey Millhone adventures ever since A is for Alibi and, on the whole, I've always found them gripping, and, by now, Kinsey seems like an old friend. So, I was very sorry to feel somewhat disappointed and let down by this latest entry.

The story here revolves around the issue of homelessness as exemplified by the homeless population of Santa Teresa, Kinsey's home town. She becomes involved when a homeless man dies one night, of apparently natural causes, in his sleeping bag on the beach. At the morgue, it is discovered that he had a slip of paper in his pocket that had Kinsey's name and phone number on it. There is no other identification, so the coroner calls Kinsey thinking that she might be able to identify him. She dutifully goes to view the body, but she's never seen him before and has no idea why he had her name in his pocket.

Though she was unable to identify him, she is intrigued by the mystery of his identity and decides to investigate further. She finds some of his friends among the homeless community and finally learns his full name. She's then able to trace his sad history and learns that he was convicted and imprisoned for many years for a crime he did not commit. Finally exonerated and released, he visits his three children in Bakersfield only to be rejected by them. He had a favorite uncle who once lived in Santa Teresa and so he comes there, hoping to find relatives.

And guess what relative he turns up? Yep, it seems that Kinsey is a cousin. Although he had never had a chance to contact her, it turns out he had, surprisingly, made a will leaving her all his worldly goods.

His wrongful imprisonment had brought him a settlement of some $600,000 from the state of California and very little of it has been spent. It looks like Kinsey's days of living from paycheck to paycheck may finally be over.  

A few weeks before this death, a shady private investigator named Pete Wolinsky was shot and killed in a bird refuge in Santa Teresa. It looked like a robbery gone wrong, but there were no witnesses and few clues and the police were making little headway in their investigation.

On the surface, these two deaths seemed totally unrelated but as Kinsey dug deeper into the mystery of the homeless man on the beach, she began to discover some strange linkages. And one of those linkages involves a medical researcher who may have been involved in some way with both of the dead men.

It becomes a complicated tale of misunderstandings, betrayals, and, ultimately, outright fraud. And Kinsey finds herself right in the middle of it.

In a long series like this, it is natural to have some ups and downs in the story-telling, and especially near the end of the run, it's easy to see how the writer might run out of steam a bit or perhaps get a little bored with her character. It may be unfair to cast such aspersions on Grafton's work, but, truly, this entry did not meet the standards that I've come to expect from her.

We've still got X, Y, and Z to go. Here's hoping the author gets her mojo back for that final trio of alphabet mystery books.


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V is for Vengeance by Sue Grafton: A review

Kinsey Millhone just gets better with age. In V is for Vengeance, she turns thirty-eight. The year is 1988 and Kinsey is in her prime as a private detective. She is tough and smart, a woman of her word who lives to see justice done. Even if it is sometimes a rough kind of justice. 

In this entry in the long-running series, we find Kinsey shopping the lingerie department at a department store and there she witnesses a woman shoplifting several items. She reports the woman to a clerk who calls in the loss prevention people. The shoplifter is followed out of the store and then confronted about the unpaid-for items she's carrying. Ultimately, she is arrested and taken to jail. For Kinsey, it is a satisfying outcome, but then, a few days later, she learns that the woman is dead, an apparent suicide. But was it? 

Her fiance' is disbelieving and hires Kinsey to get to the bottom of what he believes is murder. Little could Kinsey have anticipated where the trail from that one death will lead her. 

She uncovers a large and very professional shoplifting ring and at its center is a dapper gangster with a heart of gold. Unfortunately, right next to him is his brother, the sociopath. There is the small-time criminal who gave Kinsey her first set of lock-picks and for whom she has a soft spot in her heart. He has run afoul of the professional criminals and is in big trouble. There's the annoying journalist, the upright cop who is Kinsey's friend and one-time lover, the bent cop who is her nemesis. There is a beautiful woman who has had much sorrow in her life and now is experiencing a new kind of sorrow with an unfaithful husband and is looking for a way out. There is a long, long list of interesting characters here and, for some of the leading actors, we get to hear their stories from their own perspective. But the main focus, as always, is Kinsey Millhone and it is her tale which ties all the others together. 

We always know that for every blow dealt Kinsey, she will find a way to extract, if not actually vengeance, a kind of equilibrium. Her fans will not be disappointed by the outcome of this case. 

As Kinsey has improved with age, so has her creator Sue Grafton. Ms. Grafton knows her craft. She writes with a sure hand. There are no hesitations or false steps along the way. She knows where she is going with this story and she leads us expertly through the clues, into the heads of the main characters, and finally to a satisfying denouement. I would rate this as one of the better entries in the Kinsey Millhone series. 

I wonder what W will stand for?