Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | LP Fic Grafton, S. 2011 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Library | FIC GRA | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Dallas Public Library | LARGE PRINT - GRAFTON | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Jefferson Public Library | LP MYST GRAFTON, S. | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Newberg Public Library | FICTION GRAFTON | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Salem Main Library | LP MYSTERY Grafton, S. | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Woodburn Public Library | Grafton | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A #1 New York Times Bestselling Author -- A woman with a murky past who kills herself. A dying old man cared for by the son he abused. A lovely woman whose life is about to shatter. A professional shoplifting ring. A brutal gangster. A wandering husband. A spoiled kid awash in debt. A lonely widower desperate for answers. A ruthless business man: the spider at the center of the web. And Kinsey Millhone, whose thirty-eighth birthday present is two black eyes and a busted nose.
Author Notes
Sue Grafton was born in Louisville, Kentucky on April 24, 1940. She received a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Louisville in 1961. Her first novel Keziah Dane was published in 1967. Her second novel, The Lolly-Madonna War, was published in 1969 and she adapted it into a screenplay. After that movie was released in 1973, she worked intermittently writing for television. A series she created, Nurse, ran for two seasons on CBS in the early 1980s.
Her writing career took off when A Is for Alibi was published in 1982 and received the Mysterious Stranger Award. This was the beginning of the Kinsey Millhone Mystery series. B Is for Burglar won the Shamus and Anthony Awards and C Is for Corpse won the Anthony Award. She also received the Cartier Diamond Dagger, the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from Bouchercon, and the Ross Macdonald Literary Award. She died from cancer on December 28, 2017 at the age of 77.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
MWA Grand Master Grafton's finely tuned 22nd Kinsey Millhone novel (after 2009's U Is for Undertow) finds the sharp-witted California PI filled with remorse after the apparent suicide of Audrey Vance, a woman she helped arrest for shoplifting. When Audrey's perplexed fiance, Marvin Striker, hires Kinsey to further investigate her death, Kinsey's astute and relentless prying opens a Pandora's box. Was Audrey tied to major crime lords? Are these racketeers linked to corrupt cops? Kinsey's prickly personality and tart tongue antagonize just about everyone, including Marvin, several loan sharks, a stone-cold killer, and a hapless burglar who knows more than is healthy for him. For good measure, Kinsey gets punched in the face on her 38th birthday. An engrossing subplot involves an illicit love affair that neatly dovetails into the main story. This being 1988, Kinsey relies on her Rolodex, file cards, and land line, but her intuition is her chief asset. Readers will wish her well on her feisty and independent way to the end of the alphabet. Author tour. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
U Is for Undertow, 2009, etc.) pays out all three lines with patient expertise and a sharp eye for homely details. But none of them catches fire until Kinsey runs afoul of Sgt. Det. Leonard Priddy, of the Santa Teresa Police Department, and then gets squeezed by likable ex-con Pinky Ford, who just can't stay on the straight and narrow. And when the three strands of the story finally come together, one of them doesn't seem to be pulling its weight. As always, Grafton is as original, absorbing and humane as ever. The joints just creak a bit this time.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* V may stand for vengeance, but think V for Vegas, too that's where the latest in Grafton's Kinsey Millhone series begins. It's there, in 1986, that 23-year-old Phillip Lanahan runs afoul of Santa Teresa Mob boss Lorenzo Dante and finds himself spinning off a multilevel parking structure to an unpleasant end. V is also for Vance, shoplifter Audrey Vance. To meet her, fast-forward two years. Eagle-eyed Millhone spots her lifting silk pj's in Nordstrom's and turns her in. Later, Kinsey is surprised when the woman is found dead at the bottom of a ravine, and even more suprised when the woman's fiance hires Kinsey to prove Audrey didn't commit suicide and wasn't, as Kinsey suspects, part of an organized ring of shoplifters, or pickers. Trust Kinsey to find the truth, and trust Grafton to bring together in crazy harmony a set of circumstances and an oddly assorted bunch of characters (old acquaintances and new) that, in a lesser writer's hands, would have produced narrative chaos. With only four alphabet mysteries to go, speculation on the final installment has already begun. In the meantime, Grafton's devoted fans should sit back and enjoy a terrific installment in the here and now.--Zvirin, Stephanie Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
I'M always stumped when someone asks me to find them "a good mystery," because I might recommend a serial killer thriller like Jo Nesbo's fiendishly clever novel THE SNOWMAN (Knopf, $25.95) to someone hankering for a civilized British detective story like Peter Lovesey's STAGESTRUCK (Soho Crime, $25). So let's play favorites - but pick your poison first. FAVORITE BOOK The final exit of a beloved sleuth is the focal point of my choice: THE TROUBLED MAN (Knopf, $26.95). Henning Mankell makes it clear that his brilliant if chronically depressed Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander, has solved his last case. In the course of investigating a political conspiracy that dates back to the cold war, Wallander comes to realize "how little he actually knew about the world he had lived in" and how inadequate his efforts to fix that broken world have proved. Although it accounts for his perpetual mood of despair, that insight also makes him a hero for this age of anxiety. FAVORITE NEW SLEUTH George Pelecanos's new protagonist. Spero Lucas, is not only younger and friskier than most private eyes, he's also untainted by the cynicism that goes with the profession. Making his first appearance in THE CUT (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $25.99), Lucas brings his lusty appetites and taste for danger to a vivid narrative about gang wars in Washington, D.C. The big question: Can Pelecanos keep his young hero from flaming out? FAVORITE DEBUT NOVEL/FAVORITE ACTION THRILLER Sebastian Rotella scores twice for TRIPLE CROSSING (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $24.99), which begins on the San Diego-Tijuana border and sends good guys from both sides of the fence to combat drug smugglers and terrorists in the badlands of South America. FAVORITE COZY That would be A TRICK OF THE LIGHT (Minotaur, $25.99), Louise Penny's mystery starring Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and set in the enchanting village of Three Pines. FAVORITE REGIONAL MYSTERY In SHOCK WAVE (Putnam, $27.95), John Sandford drags Virgil Flowers away from an all-girls volleyball tournament and dispatches him to Butternut Falls, where a bomber is intent on keeping out a big-box store. FAVORITE SUSPENSE NOVEL Cara Hoffman takes on rural poverty, domestic abuse and teenage violence in her first novel, SO MUCH PRETTY (Simon & Schuster, $25), which watches a family of urbanites come to grief in upstate New York. Runner-up is another novel on the same theme: BENT ROAD (Dutton, $25.95), in which Lori Roy observes the breakdown of a family that has moved to Kansas to escape racial tensions in 1960s Detroit. FAVORITE MYSTERY WITH A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE A tie between THE END OF THE WASP SEASON (Reagan Arthur/ Little, Brown, $25.99), by Denise Mina, and THE BOY IN THE SUITCASE (Soho, $24), by the Danish authors Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis. Mina's gritty Glasgow procedural features a female cop who takes pity on a 15-year-old killer because she's witnessed the neglect that can produce such damaged children. The criminal mistreatment of children is also the focus of the Danish thriller, which follows the efforts of a nurse to identify the 3-year-old boy she rescues at the Copenhagen train station. FAVORITE NOIR Antiheroes don't get much darker than the protagonist of James Sallis's moody existential mystery, THE KILLER IS DYING (Walker, $24), a hit man who wants to make one last clean kill before he dies. But I have to go with the rogue Scott Phillips introduces in THE ADJUSTMENT (Counterpoint, $25). This prince of a fellow made a killing pimping and working the black market as an Army quartermaster in Rome during World War II. But peacetime life in Wichita is so dull it takes all his ingenuity to come up with a new way to make a dishonest living. FAVORITE SUPERNATURAL MYSTERY Michael Koryta easily takes top honors for two eerie novels, THE CYPRESS HOUSE (Little, Brown, $24.99), a 1930s gangster story with spooky undertones, and THE RIDGE (Little, Brown, $24.99), a ghost story set in an old mining region of Kentucky. FAVORITE HISTORICAL MYSTERY If the category were narrowed to World War II-era novels, it would be a tossup between FIELD GRAY (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95), the darkest of Philip Kerr's Berlin stories, and David Downing's POTSDAM STATION (Soho, $25), with its horrific scenes of Berlin falling to the Red Army. But in an open field, top honors go to C.J. Sansom for HEARTSTONE (Viking, $27.95), a Tudor mystery that captures the chaotic state of England in the aftermath of Henry VIII's ill-conceived invasion of France. FAVORITE PERFORMANCE BY AN OLD PRO That's a tough one in a year that saw top-drawer work from Michael Connelly in THE FIFTH WITNESS (Little, Brown, $27.99). James Lee Burke in FEAST DAY OF FOOLS (Simon & Schuster, $26.99) and Thomas Perry in THE INFORMANT (Otto Penzler/ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27). Sue Grafton earns special mention for keeping Kinsey Millhone engaged and endearing through her 22nd alphabet mystery, V IS FOR VENGEANCE (Marian Wood/Putnam, $27.95). But for sentimental reasons, I'm going with Lawrence Block's nostalgic novel, A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF (Mulholland/ Little, Brown, $25.99), set in New York in the 1970s, when Matt Scudder was still a working cop and crime was still "the leading occupation" in his Hell's Kitchen neighborhood.
Library Journal Review
Grafton is no slouch either, and her alphabet series has sold zillions. No reader has been named yet, and the print run numbers from Putnam are still pending, but this 22nd series volume should be as big as its predecessors. B is for buy it! (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.