Q Is For Quarry (original 2002; edition 2003)

Magnifico affresco dell'incendio spirituale che infiammò l'Europa nel '500, magistralmente scritto. ( )

Love Kinsey. Can't remember enough to distinguish one book from another in the alphabet series. Some are better than others. All are enjoyable. ( )

I started the Grafton books with "G"; this is my fourth, so I'm reading them as I find them. Having lived in Southern California since the 40s, it's nice to read about the area and Grafton's stories are very entertaining. With this book, though, Ms. Grafton is embedded in my mind as the Wolf Blitzer of detective novelists and, that's not a bad thing. ( )

Really, for a character with more than 18 books written about her, we don't know a heck of a lot about Kinsey Millhone. This one brings out her family in more detail, and I suspect by the time we get to Z there's going to be a mushy reconciliation with them. I hope not. A lot of the stories in this series are really good, and it would be a shame to finish them all out with mush.

Take this one for instance. Based on an unsolved true story of a young girl murdered in California, Grafton paints a lovely picture of small town America - the interrelationships, the unhappiness, the expectations, and comes up with an elegant and plausible plotline explaining the girl's death. Kinsey partners up with two old, sick cops who worked the murder, and the characterizations of the two are touching, and the relationships between the three are gently funny.

Grafton tries to push ahead some of the subplots of the other characters, but I'm not too sure what you can do with a romance involving a 90-year-old. I suspect it was put into the series as a bit of comic relief, and now she's going to have to write her way out of it. I'm looking forward to seeing how it all gets put together. ( )

The mystery itself was quite engaging as bits of evidence are gradually uncovered by Kinsey and her the two elderly cohorts she is assisting. The somewhat average rating is due to the fact that the story spends too much time sidetracked on side stories not essential to the mystery -- Kinsey's relationships with her extended family and the health issues and eating, smoking, and drinking habits of the detectives she is working with. ( )