Kinsey Milhone the California private investigator has had
her share of trouble. In this latest in Grafton's
fine "Alphabet' series, a homeless man is found dead in a
park. He's got Kinsey's firm's details on a piece of
paper. So begins W IS FOR WASTED.
Spanish-style architecture, bougainvillea and beaches are
the setting for much of Kinsey's work. She lives in a
garage rented out by an elderly baker, Henry, and while she
did acquire a long-distance boyfriend during the series,
she is divorced, stubbornly independent and likes her own
company. Henry's brother William, a hypochondriac with a
suddenly bad back, arrives to stay, bringing a cat which
he'd rescued from the pound. This not particularly happy
black and white odd-eyed cat makes a lively addition to the
group.
Circulating with homeless people is all in a day's work for
Kinsey, who learns that the dead man, Terrence, was hoping
to trace some family members. He'd just got out of prison
so it's possible they would not have been keen to see him.
Kinsey is flabbergasted when Terrence's relatives also turn
out to be hers. Now she's obliged to execute his will
despite the fact that it gives Terrence's family reason to
hate her. Interspersed is the last case of a defrauding PI
whose rent is long overdue and who is hired to follow a
woman working in a research institute. He decides to make
some side money out of it, but it's a bad decision.
There's a lot of reading in a Sue Grafton book, a lot of
looks at the underside of society. She makes us care about
all the characters, even the heavily-smoking down-and-outs,
even the dead man whom we never met. The tale is set back
in 1988, so we are not burdened with smartphones and
websearches; this tale carries the same hardworking
atmosphere of the early books. Step by step, document by
phone book, interview by phone call, Kinsey retraces the
path of a miscarriage of justice and a family breakdown.
She should be well aware that she's in a precarious
position but we can just see this car crash waiting to
happen as we turn the pages and the two cases fall into
line. It's compulsive reading which only gets better from
this masterly author. W IS FOR WASTED should read W for a
Worthy addition to Sue Grafton's series.
Two dead men changed the course of my life that fall. One
of them I knew and the other I’d never laid eyes on until I
saw him in the morgue.
The first was a local
PI of suspect reputation. He’d been gunned down near the
beach at Santa Teresa. It looked like a robbery gone bad.
The other was on the beach six weeks later. He’d been
sleeping rough. Probably homeless. No identification. A slip
of paper with Millhone’s name and number was in his pants
pocket. The coroner asked her to come to the morgue to see
if she could ID him.
Two seemingly unrelated
deaths, one a murder, the other apparently of natural
causes.
But as Kinsey digs deeper into the
mystery of the John Doe, some very strange linkages begin to
emerge. And before long at least one aspect is solved as
Kinsey literally finds the key to his identity. “And just
like that,” she says, “the lid to Pandora’s box flew open.
It would take me another day before I understood how many
imps had been freed, but for the moment, I was inordinately
pleased with myself.”
In this multilayered tale,
the surfaces seem clear, but the underpinnings are full of
betrayals, misunderstandings, and outright murderous fraud.
And Kinsey, through no fault of her own, is thoroughly
compromised.
W is for . . . wanderer . . .
worthless . . . wronged . . .
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