Category Archives: Sue Grafton

Books of the Month – January 2012

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I struggled to choose a single book for the month, feeling like there were several books equally deserving of the title. But in the end I’ve decided on Sulari Gentill’s MILES OFF COURSE which I finished two weeks ago but which still puts a smile on my face when I think of it. There is something I particularly treasure about a book that makes me happy and this combination of whodunnit, exploration of a lesser-known part of our history and old-fashioned fun is an absolute delight.

I finished 12 books for the month and all the rest are  recommended reads (anything rated 3 or more)

The Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012

Two of the books were by Australian woman (counting towards the total of 10 I’m aiming for) and I managed two genres as well

I also kept up as best I could with what other challenge participants are saying about the challenge in these round-up posts

Other, non-review related posts this month

What about you…was January a good reading month? Did you have a favourite book? Or did you acquire anything you’re itching to read? Any issue you need to get off your chest?

If you want to see other people’s crime fiction picks of the month head over to Mysteries in Paradise for the Pick of the Month meme

Review: V is for Vengeance by Sue Grafton

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The 22nd outing for Kinsey Millhone, private detective in the fictional California town of Santa Teresa starts with a brief prologue in which a young man is thrown to his death from the top floor of a Las Vegas parking garage after failing to pay his gambling debts to a loan shark, Lorenzo Dante.The story proper then starts two years later when Kinsey spots two shoplifters in a local department store and after alerting the store’s security to follow one of the woman Kinsey trails after the other. The first woman is Audrey Vance and she is arrested, but shortly after being bailed out of jail by her boyfriend her body is found, apparently having committed suicide from a local bridge. Kinsey is then approached by Audrey’s boyfriend who doesn’t believe she was shoplifting and wants her good name cleared. However Kinsey soon becomes convinced that Audrey was a professional shoplifter, part of a large operation. While all this is going on we’re introduced to a woman called Nora who is married to a wealthy Hollywood agent but soon experiences an upheaval in that relationship. She meets Lorenzo Dante who is tiring of his life of organised crime and becomes smitten with Nora which has unforeseen circumstances. Of course the two stories eventually connect, in several ways by the end of the novel.

This book is a return to a more traditional storytelling format after the departure into part historical fiction of 2010’s U is for Undertow. From a plotting perspective it is complicated but in Grafton’s assured hands the different elements are juggled well, always keeping the reader’s interest There are plenty of twists and turns along the way as Kinsey unravels the shoplifting racket and Nora and Lorenzo do their separate dances with fate. There is a one unlikely coincidences at the very end which I could have done without but I forgave it. I did think it a nice change for a crime novel to spend most of its investigative energy on the crime of organised shoplifting which I had no idea could be so lucrative and…well…organised! Who’d work in retail?

It’s fair to say that Kinsey has never been the most deeply drawn character in crime fiction but here she does seem to be even more solitary and one-dimensional than usual. In the past couple of books she has made tentative connections to the extended family she has discovered, after being orphaned as a young child, but there is no mention of her relatives here. Even Henry, her octogenarian landlord, plays only a minor role as he is out of state for most of the book. So for character development we turn to others including Nora and Lorenzo whose backgrounds are vastly different but whose current dissatisfaction with the direction their lives have taken is interesting to watch unfold.

I have written before about my fondness for this series and have even admitted a certain lack of objectivity which might result in me being a bit more generous about these books than others I read so you’ll have to excuse me a little. Though even I can admit that V is for Vengeance is not the best of the series.It’s a bit long for example. The first books in the series were never 450+ pages long and this one didn’t need to be either. For instance fans of the series already know about Rosie the bar owner’s dodgy Hungarian cooking and I’m sure even readers new to the series would have gotten the gag with less than a dozen or so references to it. There seemed to be a bit of unnecessary filler content like this that in earlier books was either never there to begin with or was edited out.

That said I still enjoyed catching up with Kinsey again and am philosophical about the slight waxing and waning of quality that happens with any long running series. I think i’m still objective enough to be able to say that this series is not on a downward spiral like several I’ve stopped reading all together (e.g. Patrica Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta series). Essentially this book is well in keeping with its predecessors and the main characters didn’t do anything ridiculous. I will look forward to the remaining 4 installments of the series. If you’re new to the alphabet books and are curious I would recommend you read the previous novel, U is for Undertow, which I think works much better than this one as a standalone novel or as an introduction to the series. But long time fans will be happy enough with this outing, though most will probably wish for a bit more Henry as I did.

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My rating 3.5/5
Publisher Mantle [2011]
ISBN 9780230756212
Length 437 pages
Format trade paperbak
Book Series #22 in the alphabet series.
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Sisters in Crime Challenge Post #1: The PI novel

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One day in 1987 I asked a librarian to recommend some mysteries by contemporary women writers. I walked away with my first books by both Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, so the two are inextricably linked for me. Both have long-running series featuring gutsy female private investigators and my 19 year old self adored them. Until that point virtually all of the non-dead women I’d encountered in my mystery reading had been children (Nancy Drew and Trixie Beldon) (perhaps we’ll leave for another day the fact that it’s always been easier to find smart, feisty characters for young girls to identify with in fiction than to find intelligent, feisty women for adult women to look to for inspiration), elderly (Miss Marple who is at the other end of the ‘sexless’ scale) or bits on the side for the men who solved crimes (I can’t name you one particular woman) (which is, in its way, my point). The very notion of a young woman running her own business, solving crimes on her own, being at the centre of a story instead of the periphery (not to mention having a healthy sex life without being married) was a revelation. My 43 year old self is still pretty fond of both the characters that I first encountered all those years ago.

There’s a number of reasons to like Sara Paretsky‘s work, not least of which is the character of V I (or Vic to her friends) Warshawski. I think she might be in a minority of fictional private investigators who wasn’t first in the police, though she was a lawyer with the public defender’s office. She’s independent sometimes to the point of endangering herself, can have a mean temper and is prone to sarcasm (anyone who knows me personally is wondering if I am accidentally describing myself at this point) (which probably explains my fondness for Vic).  Her business is never exactly flush with cash but she stays afloat with some steady corporate clients. The investigations that form the heart of the novels usually have some aspect of social commentary about them and it is this aspect of the books that I love most but which has also proven unsuccessful occasionally when the book has turned into more of a political rant than work of literary art. However in most of the 14 books Paretsky does a bang-up job of exploring some aspect of modern American life that undoubtedly needs some investigating. Whether it be the privatisation of prisons (1999′s Hard Time), the lengths some insurance companies will go to to weasel out of making payments (2001′s Total Recall), the aftermath of the Iraq war (2010′s Body Work) or one of the countless other social and political issues Paretsky has explored there’s always something to think about at the end of one of her novels. The BBC’s excellent monthly radio show World Book Club tackled Paretsky’s first novel, Indemnity Only, in 2007 and the show is a treat to listen to as Paretsky talks about the impetus for creating Vic, the death of the PI novel and lots of other meaty subjects.

Sue Grafton‘s work is less political in content and in some ways is even a more direct descendant of the hard-boiled PI novels that clearly inspired the series. Starting with A is for Alibi in 1982 (the same year Paretsky’s first novel was published) Kinsey Millhone has searched for missing people, investigated cold cases and generally looked into things that the police have stopped investigating in 22 books to date. The series will finish in four books’ time with (Grafton has announced) Z is for Zero. Kinsey is a real loner, a twice divorced ex-cop whose ‘family’ consists of an octogenarian landlord and a grumpy Hungarian bar owner, but she is tenacious and she does fiercely look after the few people she is close to. I know that starting all the way back at the first book of such a long series would be daunting for new readers but I think this is one series you can dip in and out of fairly easily and I think the last 2 instalments, T is for Trespass and U is for Undertow were both terrific reads. ‘U’ is particularly good being a departure from the earlier novels as it contains an entire thread of historical fiction from the 1960′s. I have to admire an author who chooses not to keep writing the same book over again even though, at this point, she could almost be forgiven for doing so.

So if I count Paretsky and Grafton as one (because I found them both at the same time) then I can mention three more ‘similar’ authors according to the rules of the challenge. Some less well-known private investigators then…

Australian author Marele Day‘s Claudia Valentine appeared in a series of four books starting with The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender which was published in 1988. I didn’t read the book until much later but, having moved to Sydney that year I can attest to the way that Day captured the time and place to perfection. Fans of feisty female PIs like Warshawski and Millhone will enjoy Claudia Valentine too and for those who’ve never tried a female PI book perhaps you should start with a smaller series :)

An author who has crossed genres and other literary boundaries over the years is English writer Sarah Dunant but her early 90′s trilogy featuring private investigator Hannah Wolfe is another firm favourite of mine. The first book, Birth Marks, involves Wolfe in an investigation into the death of a young girl who was heavily pregnant and the case allows Dunant the opportunity to explore the complex issue of surrogate mothers. In the remaining books animal experimentation and women’s body issues are both explored in depth in these intelligent books.

I can’t talk about celebrating the women who write private investigators without mentioning the person who created this challenge and who I recently discovered as an author. Barbara Fister has written two books (so far) featuring Chicago-based private investigator Anni Koskinen. In 2008′s In the Wind Anni is asked to help a woman who is believed by some to have been responsible for the murder of an FBI agent many years earlier. Something about Chicago must prompt politically-themed writing as Fister’s work shares this trait with Paretsky’s but she’s done a first-rate job of ensuring the story came first in this book. I have the second book in this series, Through the Cracks, near the top of my TBR pile. Why don’t you?

The PI novel has a long history within the crime fiction genre, allowing authors to explore storylines and themes that other sub-genres sometimes can’t. There are things that would simply be incredible in a police procedural that a PI novel can get away with and there is an appeal about the idea of a private investigator that has never gone away. For much of the genre’s history though the field was dominated by male writers and their male creations and it wasn’t until the late 1970′s that American Marcia Muller’s first Sharon McCone PI novel gained general acceptance then Paretsky and Grafton followed in the early 80′s. Personally I think these women writers have contributed significantly to the depth of the genre in terms of storylines, thought provoking themes and female characters who are a force to be reckoned with in their own right.

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To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Sisters in Crime (US) author, blogger and current Sisters in Crime board member Barbara Fister issued book bloggers the challenge of writing about women’s contribution to crime fiction. There are three levels of the challenge and I’m aiming for the expert level which requires me to write ten blog posts about works of crime fiction by a woman author and, for each, mention three similar women authors whose works I would recommend.  Though I am taking Barbara at her word and using the “whenever” deadline as a concrete goal, so it may take me a while to do all ten posts. And it turns out I might find it hard to stick to recommending just 4 authors per post. Even if you only occasionally blog about crime fiction why not join in the challenge and help celebrate the women who write it?

Halfway Down the Stairs

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OK the title really doesn’t have any relevance as this is a post about being half way through the reading year and reflecting on my favourite books so far. But I never think of the word halfway without remembering my favourite A A Milne poem. As I wrote about way back in the early days of this blog one of my very favourite bookish presents was a copy of When We Were Very Young and Halfway Down is my favourite poem from it (other people can recite Keats and Wordsworth by heart, I can do A A Milne).

Anyway, on to the favourites. Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise is collating people’s thoughts on this very topic so do stop by her blog and tell her your favourite reads so far this year. Given the overall improvement in the quality of my reading these days I could easily list a top 30 or 40 books but I suspect that is not the spirit of things so I’ve whittled it down to a favourite ten. I’ll be curious to see how many of them survive to appear in my favourite books for the year. Could I possibly read ten better books than this in the remaining 6 months of Twenty Ten?

Surmounting Series Struggles

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Weekly Geeks poses some series related questions this week. As I mainly read crime fiction series are a part of my reading life whether I like it or not though I’d love to find more standalone novels in my favourite genre (recommendations welcome).

What series do you read where you have had an issue with one of the books in the line-up?

I tend to call it quits once I reach a book (or two) that I don’t enjoy. There’s always another series.

However I have stuck it out with two long running series and both have, this year, rewarded my loyalty.

Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawski novels and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone books (also known as the alphabet series) are both long running private detective series that I have been following from their respective beginnings. I haven’t missed a book in either series, despite having misgivings several times along the way. With the alphabet series my ‘issue’ was probably more one of familiarity leading to contempt as the books have tended towards a little repetitiveness over time while with Paretsky’s novels it was the increasingly overt politics that was driving me away. The novel Blacklist was one long diatribe against the evils of the Bush administration and the Patriot Act and which apart from being annoyingly US-centric made for a not very entertaining book. As I have said before it doesn’t matter if I agree or disagree with the politics, I really don’t want to be lectured at.

Happily though both series have recently issued new installments that are terrific reads. Sue Grafton’s U is for Undertow is something of a departure of format which refreshed the series for me and Paretsky’s Hardball incorporates the politics into the storytelling as it should always have been.

Do you cut the author loose after one miss, or do you have a limit of failed books in a series before you toss in the towel?

My answer to this question depends quite a bit on how long I’ve been reading the series and how badly the series fails me. With the two series mentioned above I kept going because I’d invested a lot of time with the characters and re-visiting them takes me back to various times in my life when I read earlier books so I used them to feed a largely dormant need for nostalgia along with my reading habit.

Another long running series that I’ve been following since the beginning is Elizabeth George’s Lynley and Havers novels. However I’ve felt increasingly let down by the last four novels in the series. I’ve moved away gradually though from buying each installment on release day to waiting for the paperback version to be on sale somewhere to, in the case of Careless in Red, not forking out a penny and borrowing it from the library. As I found it pretty dreadful I think three second chances is enough and I’m now done with this series and won’t be reading the latest one which was released last month.

I like to think I’m not so fickle that I’ll give up on someone after one bad book so most of the series that I’ve abandoned (for example Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta novels, the Kathy Reichs books, Karin Slaughter’s Grant County series and James Patterson’s Alex Cross novels) have had at least one second chances before I consigned them to my personal scrap heap.

My exception to this rule would be if I’ve only read one book in a series and not liked it. In such cases it would take a fairly powerful recommendation for me to pick up another book in the series.

What’s your suggestion for that book that you struggle with in a series?

Don’t read it.

Seriously.

If you really want to read the book that comes after it seek out some spoiler-containing reviews of the book you’ve abandoned to get the gist of the main plot points and character developments and move on to the new title.

You do not owe anybody anything when it comes to your leisure time.

Anything else you’d like to say about series? (I added this question myself as I geared up for a mini rant)

Yes.

I would like to issue a plea to series authors not to assume I am going to have read every word you’ve ever written.  I know that is your ideal but sometimes reality falls short of our lofty expectations and if I pick up book 1+n in your series I should not be totally and utterly bamboozled by references to things that have happened in prior books. Either provide a bit of repetition between your books or don’t mention it at all.

There is nothing more guaranteed to get me to abandon an author forever than vague references to prior events that need to be understood to make sense of current events.

This practice has been known to lead to the sticking of pins in the eyes of author-shaped dolls.

You’ve been warned.

Review: U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

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Who’d a thunk it? 21 installments into a series and, far from being a return to a comfort zone, Sue Grafton’s latest effort is something of a departure from the routine. As the book opens private investigator Kinsey Millhone is asked to do a day’s work by a young man, Michael Sutton. When he was six years old he saw two men burying something in the woods and, due to a recent newspaper article, he now believes they may have been burying the body of Mary Claire Fitzhugh, a four-year-old child who was kidnapped in 1967 and has never been seen since. Kinsey soon learns that it’s not as clear-cut as Michael thought but, as always, she doggedly nuts out all the facts and builds her case.

With respect to the doggedness of Kinsey the book is as familiar as an old cardigan but the surprising element for me was that Kinsey’s is only one of several stories that unfold in this book. In addition there’s a thread that takes place in the 1960′s featuring people who may, or may not, have had something to do with the kidnapping of the young child. The person who features most strongly in that thread is a woman called Deborah Unrah whose grown son returns home greatly changed by the flower power movement and drug culture of the 1960′s. There’s also a parallel thread to Kinsey’s in 1988 featuring a middle-aged man called Walker McNally who is a rather repugnant alcoholic. These two characters, and several others who orbit around them both, are deeply and perceptively depicted as their colliding stories are told.

In some ways the ending of the book is fairly predictable but this book isn’t the same kind of procedural as its predecessors and relies less on that kind of suspense for its drama and conflict. Instead I was gripped by Grafton’s exploration of a single concept across all the disparate threads. All of the stories, even Kinsey’s own, relate in some way to the notion of family and the myriad ways that concept can manifest in society. This book is really about why things happen rather than what happened and it’s this that is something of a departure for this series.

Grafton is one of the few authors whose books I have read in order roughly at the time they were published and due to familiarity breeding a little contempt I have tended, of late, not to look forward to them with the same anticipation that I once did. However this outing shows that Grafton still has her story telling abilities well to the fore and she is not afraid to take the risk of trying something new. Apart from discovering anew that 69-year-old Grafton is still at the top of her game I’ve also been reminded that some authors stay on the best seller lists because they are good, not merely because they have great publicity machines.

I would highly recommend the book to both Grafton’s fans, who will have just enough of the familiar to satiate their needs (though not enough Henry for most I admit), and those who have never read Grafton before because this, more than most of her other alphabet tales, is a standalone book of the highest quality. All of the niggly things about the series (such as Kinsey’s failure to age and the ever-increasing gap between the technology available to Kinsey and that available to the rest of us) really take a back seat in this installment because here stories with undercurrents are all that matter.

I can also recommend to audio book fans the added treat of listening to Judy Kaye’s excellent narration which really did make the long-ish book simply fly by.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 4.5/5

Narrator: Judy Kaye, Publisher: Random House Audio [2009], Length: 14hrs 5mins, Setting: California, USA 1960′s and 1988.

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On the day ‘U’ was released Sarah Weinman’s article based on her interview with Sue Grafton appeared in the LA Times and a Q&A by Carol Memmott also appeared in USA Today.

U is for Undertow has been reviewed at Lesa’s Book Critiques, Book Dilettante and Reviewing the Evidence but if you’re looking for a negative perspective you’ll have to trawl through the Amazon reviews and even then you’ll have to look hard.

The only other novel in this series that I have reviewed here is T is for Trespass which received the same rating for vastly different reasons.

Review: T is for Trespass by Sue Grafton

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Title: T is for Trespass

Author: Sue Grafton

Publisher: Pan Books [originally 2007, this edition 2008]

ISBN: 978-0-330-43889-6

Despite my best intentions to write a straight-forward review this became more of a reflection on the alphabet series and my experiences with it. My apologies for the self-indulgence.

Sue Grafton’s alphabet books are one of only two crime fiction series I have read completely, in order, roughly at the time of their release (Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawski novels being the other series). I discovered them both when I was in my teens and looking for a grown-up version of the Trixie Beldon and Nancy Drew books I’d loved as a kid.

For those who’ve never met her Kinsey Millhone is the star of this series and is a private investigator in the fictional town of Santa Teresa, California. She’s in her late thirties, lives alone in a converted garage owned by her 88-year old neighbour Henry and spends some of her spare time socialising at a local bar where she eats whatever Hungarian meal the owner, Rosie, decides she should have, and chats with Rosie and her new husband (Henry’s hypochondriac brother William). Kinsey can be relied upon to doggedly progress through whatever investigations she’s employed to undertake and sometimes, as with this book, she becomes embroiled in cases where her drive to sort out the problem is a moral one rather than financial. Either way Kinsey does not give up. Ever. In T is for Trespass we see Kinsey investigating a potential insurance fraud at the same time as she steps in when she suspects that one of her neighbours might be the victim of elder abuse. As always happens in Kinsey Millhone novels there’s a fair amount of detail about the mundane processes involved in private investigation and while this can be interesting it’s getting a little repetitive by now. Especially as this book has twice the number of pages as the first one (released in 1983) but, in my humble opinion, does not have twice as much story (so the bulk is, by and large, more mundane details and more eating of pimento sandwiches).

Despite appearing in a total of 20 books time has moved very slowly for Kinsey Millhone. A is for Alibi was a contemporary novel but this latest book takes place in the few weeks either side of New Year 1988 which makes it, for want of another term, historical. Grafton outlines the reasons for this in a 1999 interview. Transitioning between these two types of writing (contemporary and historical) within the one series hasn’t always been successful and there have been occasions when I’ve really noticed that she’s included a reference to some trend or event only due to the benefit of 20/20 hindsight but, to be fair, I didn’t notice any specific incidents in this particular book.

The story in this book is a good one. The last 150 pages or so had me glued in a way that I haven’t been since the middle of the alphabet. And, as always, the intricate plot is well executed and credible, especially if you’re familiar with Kinsey and Henry who behaved in ways that you and I might not but that they definitely would do. Trust me, I’ve known these people for 26 years now. Frankly I could have done without the ‘filler’ content but a memo seems to have gone out to all crime fiction authors everywhere that more is better because it’s becoming impossible to find a book with less than 400 pages I guess I have to get used to it.

As my reading tastes have matured and I’ve discovered dozens of new authors I’ve stopped reading lots of my former favourites. But while it’s often occurred to me that I might not read the next Kinsey book I always seem to end up with it in my hands at some stage and, at least in this instance, I’ve thoroughly enjoying reacquainting myself with her. I think my fondness for Kinsey stems from several factors including the fact I discovered her when I was young and impressionable. Also, over the years I’ve spent more time with her than I have with some real people I know. I have family living in Los Angeles and there’s a limit to how many times a girl can go to Disneyland so whenever I’m visiting and get bored with LA I pinch my brother’s car and take personal tours of sites mentioned in the books. While Santa Teresa is fictional, references to real place the town to the north of Los Angeles and south of San Francisco and Kinsey has traversed most of the state at some point or other. And I’ve had great fun following in her footsteps over the years.

I really can’t make an objective recommendation to people who’ve never read one of this series before but if you’re an old friend of Kinsey’s too I think you’d enjoy this outing.

My rating (4.5/5) (but that’s a very subjective score based on the memories this brought back as well as the enjoyment of the current book)