Calling T is for Trespass "taut, terrifying, transfixing and
terrific," USA Today went on to ask, "What does it take to
write twenty novels about the same character and manage to
create a fresh, genre-bending novel every time?" It's a
question worth pondering. Through twenty excursions into the
dark side of the human soul, Sue Grafton has never written
the same book twice. And so it is with this, her
twenty-first. Once again, she breaks genre formulas, giving
us a twisting, complex, surprise-filled, and totally
satisfying thriller.
It's April, 1988, a month before Kinsey Millhone's
thirty-eighth birthday, and she's alone in her office doing
paperwork when a young man arrives unannounced. He has a
preppy air about him and looks as if he'd be carded if he
tried to buy booze, but Michael Sutton is twenty-seven, an
unemployed college dropout. Twenty-one years earlier, a
four-year-old girl disappeared. A recent reference to her
kidnapping has triggered a flood of memories. Sutton now
believes he stumbled on her lonely burial when he was six
years old. He wants Kinsey's help in locating the child's
remains and finding the men who killed her. It's a long shot
but he's willing to pay cash up front, and Kinsey agrees to
give him one day. As her investigation unfolds, she
discovers Michael Sutton has an uneasy relationship with the
truth. In essence, he's the boy who cried wolf. Is his
current story true or simply one more in a long line of
fabrications?
Grafton moves the narrative between the eighties and the
sixties, changing points of view, building multiple
subplots, and creating memorable characters. Gradually, we
see how they all connect. But at the beating center of the
novel is Kinsey Millhone, sharp-tongued, observant, a
loner-"a heroine," said The New York Times Book Review,
"with foibles you can laugh at and faults you can forgive."