The Nature of Things

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 ...

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...

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 ho...

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 d...