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Kinsey Millhone series

• "A" is for Alibi (1982)
• "B" is for Burglar (1985)
• "C" is for Corpse (1986)
• "D" is for Deadbeat (1987)
• "E" is for Evidence (1988)
• "F" is for Fugitive (1989)
• "G" is for Gumshoe (1990)
• "H" is for Homicide (1991)
• "I" is for Innocent (1992)
• "J" is for Judgment (1993)
• "K" is for Killer (1994)
• "L" is for Lawless (1995)
• "M" is for Malice (1996)  Recommended
• "N" is for Noose (1998)
• “O” is for Outlaw (1999)
• "P" Is for Peril (2001)
• "Q" Is for Quarry (2002)

About Sue Grafton

• "G" is for Grafton: The World of Kinsey Millhone by Natalie Hevener Kaufman and Carol McGinnis Kay

Sue Grafton was born in 1940 in Louisville, KY. She has a B.A. from the University of Louisville and is married to Steven F. Humphrey. She has worked as a screen writer for both films and television.

Along with Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton is among the new breed of mystery writers creating tough female detectives who exhibit the hard-boiled characteristics formerly reserved for men. Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Paretsty’s V.I. Warshawski both first appeared in 1982. V.I. has made it to the screen in a terrible movie starring Kathleen Turner, but don’t expect to see Kinsey on the screen—either the big screen or the small one—any time soon. Having worked as a screen writer for both films and television, Grafton knows what happens to writer’s books and characters during their transformation to the screen. She has vowed not to subject Kinsey Millhone to that treatment.

A little over five years ago Wendell Jaffe disappeared from his sail boat, leaving behind a suicide note and a failed, fraudulent investment company. Jaffe also left behind a business partner who went to jail for fraud, a financially strapped wife, Dana, and two sons, ages 17 and 12 at the time of their father's disappearance. Kinsey Millhone's former employer, California Fidelity, issued a policy on Wendell Jaffe's life but was reluctant to pay up without benefit of a body. Now that the required five years have elapsed, Dana Jaffe has had her husband declared legally dead, and CF has been forced to turn over the $500,000.

But the agent who sold Wendell Jaffe the life insurance policy insists that he has seen Jaffe at a small resort in Mexico. CF hires Kinsey to find out whether Wendell is really dead, a task that she jauntingly undertakes with liberal doses of her self-deprecating humor.

This novel differs from more traditional mysteries in that it raises more questions than it answers. Kinsey does finally settle the matter of whether CF must pay out Wendell Jaffe's death benefit, but in the process she encounters disturbing questions about human nature, about peoples' motivations and emotions.

And the most intriguing questions the novel raises are about Kinsey herself. While she's questioning Dana Jaffe's neighbors, a retired man whose hobby is researching family crests asks Kinsey if she's related to the Burton Kinseys of Lompoc. As far as Kinsey knows she has no family, but the question nags at her.

Kinsey's parents were both killed in an automobile accident on the road to Lompoc when Kinsey was 5 years old. She was raised by her maiden aunt, Aunt Ginny, her mother's sister. Aunt Ginny, who died about 10 years before the time of this novel, never told Kinsey about any other family. But when Kinsey checks her parents' marriage license application, she finds that Burton Kinsey is indeed her mother's father.

A few days later a woman shows up at Kinsey's office and identifies herself as Kinsey's cousin Liza. She then proceeds to tell Kinsey the family story. Kinsey's mother, Rita, the oldest of five sisters, was disowned by her wealthy parents when, at age 18, she married a 33-year-old mailman. Kinsey is stunned to learn that she has three more aunts, a bunch of cousins, and a grandmother (grandfather Burton having died within the last year) who have lived less than an hour's drive away all of Kinsey's life.

Kinsey's cousins seem to expect her to welcome her newfound family with open arms, but Kinsey's reaction is guarded. Now 34 years old, she wonders why no one ever got in touch with her before, particularly 10 years ago when Aunt Ginny died. "`I've made my peace with the fact that I'm alone. I like my life as it is, and I'm not at all sure I want to change'" (p. 285), Kinsey tells her cousin Tasha. And Kinsey ends her characteristic epilogue with the sentence "God knows I have questions about my own life to answer yet" (360).

Janice Kepler is having trouble coping with her daughter's death. She's joined a support group but finds it little comfort. One night she leaves the group meeting early and sees a light on in the office of Millhone Investigations. Janice explains to Kinsey Millhone that police have uncovered no motive and no leads in t he case since her daughter's badly decomposed body was found ten months earlier: "Whoever did this, I want him punished. I want this laid to rest . . . I'm sick and tired of talk. It gets nowhere."

So Kinsey begins her investigation into the death-and life-of the beautiful, headstrong, selfish, secretive Lorna Kepler. In confronting the ghost of the dead Lorna, Kinsey must enter the dark, subterranean worlds of prostitution, pornography, political corruption, graft, greed, and dysfunctional family secrets.

Many critics called "K" is for Killer Grafton's darkest, most disturbing novel. Grafton herself may have felt the same way, because "L" is for Lawless seems to be a concerted attempt at humor.

The novel opens in comical circumstances: Henry Pitts, Kinsey's landlord, and his four siblings, whose ages range from Henry's 85 to Charlie's 93, are preparing for the wedding of older brother William to Rosie (age 70), owner of the neighborhood tavern. "With William pushing eighty-eight, the phrase `until death do us part' was statistically more significant for them than for most." The four Pitts brothers, collectively known as "the boys," and sister Nell provide a humorous picture of long-term sibling rivalry.

Amidst the wedding preparations, Henry asks Kinsey-who's scheduled to be a bridesmaid-if she'd mind helping out a neighborhood family having trouble collecting death benefits from the Veterans Administration. It's her involvement with this family that initiates the cross-country chase of the book's mystery, but not before Kinsey has a chance to showcase her wit:

Somehow in my profession I seem to spend a lot of time in kitchens looking on while men make sandwiches, and I can state categorically, they do it better than women. Men are fearless. They have no interest in nutrition and seldom study the list of chemicals provided on the package. I've never seen a man cut the crusts off the bread or worry about the aesthetics of the "presentation." Forget the sprig of parsley and the radish rosette. With men, it's strictly a grunt-and-munch operation (36).

As a child I was raised with the same kind of white bread . . . you could roll it into little pellets and flick them across the table at your aunt when she wasn't looking. If one of these bread boogers landed in her hair, she would slap at it, irritated, thinking it was a fly (36-37).

Now you see? This is the beauty of keeping up those skills. In a crisis situation, I had only to open my mouth and a fib flopped out. An unpracticed liar can't always rise to the occasion like I can (110).

"M" is for Malice (1996) Recommended
Henry Holt and Company, 300 pages, $25.00 hardcover, ISBN 0-8050-3637-7

"M" is for melancholy, the mood in which we find Kinsey Millhone at the beginning of this book:

Ah, January. The holidays had left me feeling restless and the advent of the new year generated one of those lengthy internal discussions about the meaning of life. I usually don't pay much attention to the passing of time, but this year, for some reason, I was taking a good hard look at myself. Who was I, really, in the scheme of things, and what did it all add up to?… For the last ten years, I've made a living as a private investigator. Some days I see myself (nobly, I'll admit) battling against evil in the struggle for law and order. Other days, I concede that the dark forces are gaining ground (2).

But reality is not pleasant. When the patriarch of Malek Construction, one of the big three in California construction, dies, his family hires Kinsey Millhone to find Guy Malek, who disappeared eighteen years earlier. The remaining three Malek brothers are not eager to split the $40 million company a fourth way, but they must find Guy (or prove that he's dead) to settle the estate.

Finding Guy Malek proves to be easy. When Kinsey tells him she's been hired to locate him, Guy thinks that his family has finally come looking for him just because they want him back. Kinsey observes, "I was struck by the fact that his circumstances were oddly reminiscent of mine, both of us trying to assimilate fractured family connections. At least he welcomed his, though he'd misunderstood the purpose of my visit" (61).

The Malek brothers do not welcome the long-lost Guy back. As Kinsey digs under the surface of this fractured family's dynamics, she continues to brood over the meaning of family and personal relationships. Her brooding deepens with the sudden return of Robert Deitz, a private investigator who has worked as her bodyguard and with whom she had a brief affair. A little over two years earlier Deitz left for Germany to run antiterrorist training exercises for overseas U.S. military bases. Now Kinsey is miffed that he thinks he can just waltz back into her life: "This time he didn't ask if I was mad. This was good because, in truth, I was furious. Under the fury was the old familiar pain. Why does everyone end up leaving me? What did I ever do to them?" (88).

Eventually Kinsey and Deitz do reconnect:

I looked away from him, thinking about the fearful risks of intimacy, the potential for loss, the tender pain implicit in any bond between two creatures—human or beast, what difference did it make? In me, the instinct for survival and the need for love had been at war for years. My caution was like a wall I'd built to keep me safe. But safety is an illusion and the danger of feeling too much is no worse than the danger of being numb (108-109).

In the end, I set him free, not in sorrow, but in love. It wasn't for me. It was something I did for him. When I woke, I knew that he was truly gone. The tears I wept for him then were the same tears I'd wept for everyone I'd ever loved. My parents, my aunt. I had never said good-bye to them, either, but it was time to take care of it (300).

Sue Grafton's new novel finds Kinsey Millhone ready to leave Nevada after caring for Dietz, her off-again, on-again lover, for a couple of weeks after his knee-replacement operation. Dietz refers Kinsey for a job he can't take on because of his surgery. On her way back home to Santa Teresa, Kinsey stops off in the small, isolated community of Nota Lake, California, to check out the job.

Tom Newquist, a deputy with the Nota Lake sheriff's department, died of an apparent heart attack several weeks earlier. But his widow, Selma, thinks that Tom was acting distracted for a while before his death. Selma hires Kinsey to find out what was bothering Tom, just to clear up what she calls this "unfinished business." When Kinsey begins asking questions, she quickly learns that everyone loved Tom, that nobody likes Selma, and that just about everybody thinks Tom was a saint for putting up with being married to Selma. Kinsey finds out just how efficiently the residents of a small community can circle the wagons to protect one of their own and to keep an outsider out. But when someone wearing a ski mask attacks and threatens her, Kinsey begins to believe Selma's notion that Tom might have been harboring some secret.

"N" is for Noose contains many of Grafton's characteristic strengths. Her skill with telling details is evident in the picture of small-town life that she paints. And there is, of course, Kinsey's usual brand of humor: after acknowledging that Dietz had searched her apartment while staying with her, Kinsey adds, "Neither of us had ever mentioned his invasion of my privacy, but I vowed I'd do likewise when the opportunity arose. Between working detectives, this is known as professional courtesy. You toss my place and I'll toss yours" (5).

Unfortunately, though, this novel suffers by comparison with its predecessor, "M" is for Malice, which I think is the best of the Kinsey Millhone series. After "M," anything short of perfection must fail to satisfy. What particularly bothers me about "N" is for Noose is the denouement, in which Kinsey must decipher some information that Tom has written in code in his notebook. The problem is that this piece of information is something that no one—not even the methodical, strictly-by-the-book Tom—would have written down; he would just have kept the information in his head until he had figured out what to do about it.

However, even a slightly less than perfect book by Sue Grafton is still a darn good book. Admirers of Sue Grafton and Kinsey Millhone won't be disappointed by "N" is for Noose.

This book could more accurately be entitled "K" is for Kinsey. With chapters such as "Kinsey's Biography," "Kinsey's Personality," and "Kinsey's Daily Life," the book is more about the fictional character Kinsey Millhone than about Kinsey's creator, writer Sue Grafton. Only in the final two (out of 10) chapters do the authors address the author herself: "Grafton on Kinsey" and "Grafton's Writing Style."

As the majority of the chapter titles suggest, a curious reader can find in this book just about every possible detail about private investigator Kinsey Millhone's life. As the authors say in the Preface, "Those of us who read detective fiction love the pleasure of details and we love seeing the pattern behind the details."

According to the dust jacket, both authors of this book are academicians: "Kaufman is a political scientist specializing in international law and gender politics, and Kay is a professor of English with a specialty in Shakespeare." Unfortunately, this scholarly orientation frequently shows up in the tendency to over-analyze fictional details: "(We note with interest that Kinsey has lived most of her life in a series of trailer parks, and now, during the novels, she lives in an apartment converted from garage space, both settings associated with travel and impermanence.)"--13.

For this reason I have mixed feelings about books such as this. While it may be interesting, even amusing, to have all these facts at hand, it's ludicrous to treat a fictional character as if she were a historical personage worthy of a biography. And the overly scholarly analysis of popular literature often comes across as just plain silly.

In an introductory note Grafton explains to the reader that Kinsey Millhone time progresses at a slower pace than real time: “Since the books are sequential, Ms. Millhone is caught up in a time warp and is currently living and working in the year 1986, without access to cell phones, the Internet, or other high-tech equipment used by modern-day private investigators. She relies on persistence, imagination, and ingenuity: the stock-in-trade of the traditional gumshoe throughout hard-boiled history.” At least in terms of high-tech hardware Kinsey differs from her counterpart V.I. Warshawski, who, in her latest adventure, totes around a cell phone and a Palm Pilot, and uses a desktop computer connected to the Internet to dig up information with the help of electronic databases.

In “O” is for Outlaw Kinsey revisits her past when long-forgotten personal items surface from a storage locker previously rented by Kinsey’s first husband, Mickey Magruder. Kinsey married Mickey, a cop, when she was 19 or 20 and still a student at the police academy. The marriage didn’t last long: she filed for divorce when Mickey wanted her to lie to provide him with an alibi in an investigation that finally got him expelled from the police force. She would have divorced him eventually anyway, though, once she found out about his drinking and womanizing.

When Kinsey learns that Mickey has been shot by an unknown gunman and is comatose, she decides to find out what brought him to that fate. Her investigation involves looking into her own past as well as into Mickey’s. Along the way she finds that she may have been too quick to judge Mickey, too quick to walk away.

When she’s finally unraveled the mystery, she returns to the dying Mickey’s bedside: “After the rapture of love comes the wreckage, at least in my experience. I thought of all the things he’d taught me, the things we’d been to each other during that brief marriage. My life was the richer for his having been part of it. Whatever his flaws, whatever his failings, his redemption was something he’d earned in the end” (318).

This is a kinder, gentler Kinsey than we’ve seen before. By providing such character nuances, Sue Grafton keeps fresh this continuing series.

"P" Is for Peril (2001)
Putnam, 352 pages, $26.95 hardcover, ISBN 0399147195; Audible

Dr. Dowan Purcell has been missing for nine weeks by the time his ex-wife, Fiona, hires Kinsey to find him. The 69-year-old doctor, a respected member of the local medical community, is director of a nursing home. He's now married to a much younger wife, Crystal, with whom he has a 2-year-old son. Fiona thinks Purcell might have deliberately disappeared. Crystal thinks he must be dead. Kinsey doesn't think she'll find out much that the cops haven't already discovered in nine weeks, but she agrees to look into the disappearance despite her instinctive dislike of the austere Fiona.

Kinsey soon learns that Dr. Purcell's nursing home is being investigated for Medicare fraud. But beyond this there doesn't seem to be much information about the doctor. In the meantime, Kinsey looks for new office space to rent and is excited to find what she thinks is the perfect place.

Sue Grafton is somewhat off in her latest alphabet mystery. The first problem is the pacing. Kinsey spends an awful lot of time learning virtually nothing about Purcell's disappearance; I kept listening and waiting for something-anything-to happen.

A second problem is the subplot of Kinsey's relationship with the landlords of her newly rented office space. Grafton usually makes her subplots relate somehow to the main plot, but there's no such connection between the two elements in "P" Is for Peril. And the subplot is never adequately resolved. (After the scene in the Hevner garage, would one of the brothers simply get into his car and drive off without doing anything about Kinsey?) Further, the subplot probably would have made a more interesting main plot than the story of Dr. Purcell turns out to be.

The third problem with this novel is its dénouement, which reveals the killer but fails to answer a lot of questions about the crime. Exactly how was the murder committed? Did one of the minor characters help out, as certain incidents suggest? Also, the apparent motivation for the crime comes out of nowhere and, without adequate preparation, is not at all convincing. Sue Grafton usually ties all the story's loose ends up in a way that explains them all and brings closure to the various characters and events. But in this novel she simply stops.

One challenge of writing a continuing series is adding the nuances necessary to keep the recurrent character fresh for readers. At the end of "O" Is for Outlaw Grafton introduced a kinder, gentler Kinsey, but there is no trace of that persona in this next installment. Nonetheless, devotees of Kinsey Millhone will be glad of another chance to spend some time with her.

“Q” Is for Quarry (2002)
Putnam, 385 pages, $26.95 hardcover, ISBN 0-399-14915-5

After her worst outing yet (“P” is for poor), Kinsey is back, this time helping two aging police detectives take another crack at a cold case—a still unsolved murder from 18 years earlier. Found with her hands bound by a length of wire, the victim was a young woman with multiple stab wounds and a slashed throat. Her body had been dumped in a quarry off Highway 1 in Grafton’s fictional Santa Teresa County, California.

The relationship between the two male police detectives in this novel is a subplot that adds interest to the standard investigation into the identity of the victim and, then, of the killer. With Kinsey doing much of the routine legwork of the investigation, they have plenty of time to fuss over each other, and each becomes increasingly more protective of the other.

Earlier in the series Grafton introduced another subplot, the story of Kinsey’s relationship with her newly discovered family, to add depth and variety to her stories. In this book, though, that subplot is a mere afterthought. It just so happens that Kinsey’s grandmother owns the quarry where the body was dumped. Kinsey once again sees her cousin Tasha and, for the first time, meets Tasha’s mother, Kinsey’s Aunt Susanna. Susanna gives Kinsey an album of family photos, but there is no significant change in the way Kinsey feels about the family that’s now trying to claim her after ignoring her for nearly 30 years.

What’s different about this book from the others in the series is that Grafton based this one on an actual unsolved homicide case from 1969. When the investigation of the case was reopened by the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department in 2001, Grafton was given full access to all records. At that time the body was exhumed and a forensic sculptor prepared a facial reconstruction. Photographs of that model appear at the end of the novel, and both Grafton and the Sheriff’s Department hope that someone may recognize and identify the young woman.

Although this novel is better than “P” Is for Peril, Grafton’s construction of a mystery around a few central details appears mechanical and uninspired. The length of time between novels is increasing, and it appears, unfortunately, that Grafton may be running out of gas, at least with Kinsey Millhone.

(January 13, 2004)

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