H is for Homicide

I love Kinsey Millhone. But she's not everyone's cup of tea. I started reading the Alphabet series a few years ago - I think at the time it was up to O is for Outlaw. The idea of a mystery series each title beginning with a new letter amused me. I don't know why. I don't think it's particularly original. At least - I've seen a few others since. At the time though it was new to me and it just struck me as perfect. I flew through the series. Kinsey is riveting. She's brash and harsh and charming. She's fierce and flawed. She gets scared. She holds her own. She pushes herself to run often and tackles cases without judgement and with an open mind. Rosie and Henry are brilliant and I love the little family she builds around her.

But Kinsey show more Millhone isn't Jack Reacher - her speed is more Tracy Crosswhite. [book:My Sister's Grave|22341263] Her cases aren't full of action and high speed chases - they're slowly nitpicking away until something clicks into place. She writes down all her thoughts and places her facts and ideas on 3x5 index cards - which she often shuffles and rearranges to help her solve her case. And I love it. Kinsey Millhone is great - but she's not for everyone.

For some reason I've seen reviewers compare this to Stephanie Plum - I don't know why - this is absolutely NOTHING like that. Stephanie Plum is a very different character and an extremely different type of book. That's more fluff. Kinsey Millhone is more procedural mysteries. And this series isn't current - it was first published in the 80's - there's not really technology. Messages were relayed by calling the landlines. Paper files were still the main form of storage. Not everyone will enjoy reading this. But if you like your mysteries to be more like procedurals with a determined and fierce character - Kinsey Millhone is for you.



This was super intense. It started off slow and snowballed. I just finished and I'm full of adrenaline. The ending was fantastic, although I would've loved to hear/see more about Jimmy Tate - was he undercover afterall? - and the fallout with Bibianna learning Hannah is Kinsey and the rest. I loved the mystery in this one and Kinsey's foray into undercover work. And man - could you get any more if anything can go wrong it will go wrong? She's so fkd in this one. Every time she blinked the cops/bad guys/someone fkd up and she was left improvising. And I would've liked Gordon Titus (the insurance efficiency overseer) to have been fired instead of Kinsey. I mean, I'm sure Kinsey will land on her feet but it would've been nice to see someone else get screwed.



4.5 stars, rounded up to 5. show less

Out of the 10 books that I’ve read in the Sue Grafton alphabet series, H is for Homicide is one of my 3 or 4 favorites. The plot is both intriguing and believable, and the suspense makes it a hard book to put down. Private investigator Kinsey Mallone is resourceful, courageous, and entirely human, which is to say that she has distinctive foibles and doesn’t always show the best judgement.

Kinsey works for an insurance company for California Fidelity, investigating insurance fraud. When a claims adjustor for CF is found murdered, the case thrusts her into the center of a large insurance scam ring. The ring includes physicians, attorneys, and a pack of lowlife scam artists themselves, who stage auto accidents in order to collect for show more medical fees and property damage. The ring is headed by Raymond Maldonado, a well- drawn and bizarrely memorable character who is both frightening (given his barely controlled violence) and pathetic (due to a severe form of Tourette's syndrome, each episode of which presages a violent episode). Raymond kidnaps Bibianna (his ex- girlfriend, whom he hopes to marry), and Kinsey worms her way into the group through her acquaintanceship with Bibianna. Bureaucratic blunders by the police put Kinsey’s life in serious danger, and it’s an open question through much of the book as to whether she will be exposed as a police informant and PI before she can get word to the police and to CI as to where she is.


The plot and action aside, Kinsey’s sassy banter and the off-beat characters are other reasons to enjoy this book. Yet another reason lies with Sue Grafton’s insights and powers of description. ”Violence is a form of theater that only the disenfranchised can afford” she ruminates at one point. ” Admission is cheap. The bill of fare is an ever-changing drama of life and death, drugs and stickups, drive-bys, retaliations, the fearfulness of mothers who look on in anguish from the sidelines. As often as not, it’s the bystanders who fall prey to the spray of random bullets.


Here she stands at the bar, watching the other patrons: ”I spotted Bibianna on the dance floor, undulating with remarkable energy and grace to some grinding sex tune. Men’s eyes seemed to follow every shimmy, every bump. The blue lights reacted with the olive tones of her skin to create an unearthly radiance that emphasized the smooth oval of her face above the bulging breasts in the low cut chemise. The dress seemed to glow more purple than red, pulled taut across the flat belly slim hips, and trim thighs. When the music ended, she gave her dark hair a toss, and moved away from the dance floor without a backward glance. Her partner, visibly winded, looked after her with admiration.”

And here she reflects on her friend Jimmy: ”In the past, his relationships with women had been easy to track, light-hearted forays with no emotional strings attached. A few laughs, some quick sex, a couple of weeks of companionship…. The women he dated were often smart but self- deluding, announcing upfront that all they were looking for was fun and games when in fact they bonded with him… and quickly shifted into emotional bait and switch…. Each would become fixated, hooked by his availability, his casual charm, the sexuality… They’d begin to service him, cooking meals, ironing shirts, subtly demonstrating how much better his life could be if they were somewhere on the premises. They’d begin to quiz him about his past relationships, trying to figure out what the last woman did wrong, trying to delete from their own behavior the qualities that had generated their predecessor’s demise… Personal sacrifice netted these women nothing… He was irresponsible, as promiscuous as ever, though he tried to be polite. .. Their anger would begin to surface because there was no payoff to the subservience. Each woman, in turn, would start to feel victimized, and Jimmy was the obvious target of their discontent…. Within a month, they’d make some demand, perhaps complain, voicing their barely controlled expressions of disappointment and rebuke. The minute that happened, Jimmy was out of the door without so much as a Thank you Ma’am…” You’ll never see an insightful description like that in the works of Chandler, Hammett, Parker, or Ellroy. Sue Grafton is one of a kind.

The plot does have a few elements that some reviewers have found questionable. Some find it surprising that Kinsey strikes a female police officer in the face, in order to get arrested with Bibianna. Some also have remarked on the fact that towards the end, she doesn't take the opportunity to escape the hospital and her suspicious captors, in hopes of warning her one-time friend Jimmy Tate about Raymond. To my mind, these aspects make Kinsey a more real character, a captivating mixture of impulsiveness and a level of bravado through which she puts her own safety at serious risk for the sake of a friendship and the criminal case at hand. show less

Doesn't matter to me if Kinsey nabs the bad guy in the end or not - her sassy banter and the off beat characters keep things going as much the mystery does itself. The hook on the last page really has me looking forward to the next in this series.

Thoroughly enjoyed the massive change of pace, in this instalment of SG’s alphabet series. KM is left no time to pine for the sexy C&W loving P.I. from the last instalment, when she is plunged into an intense situation, in which she handles herself with aplomb. With her chief companion we see another tender portrait of a character who hasn’t had an easy ride, which I appreciated.

Kinsey Milhone unexpectedly and unwillingly ends undercover as she investigates the death of a friend who is trying to uncover suspected insurance fraud. Her undercover work places her right in league with the people perpetrating the fraud. If they find out who she really is, she will be in deep danger. Another great page-turner from Sue Grafton.

Kinsey Millhone allows herself to be convinced to work undercover to break up an insurance fraud ring, more for the people she has become attached to than out of any basic altruism. The plot varies from the usual 'whodunnit' format, as we know immediately who (most of) the bad guys are, and the suspense is in the details of how she manages the undercover work and how she gets out of it alive (of course she does, we're up to 'U'!). I found this extremely exciting and entertaining, full of telling details and fast action.

Full review: https://wanderinglectiophile.wordpress.com/2018/05/24/mini-reviews-kinsey-millho...

Undercover work makes for a nice change of pace and story structure for this series. I found myself equally excited and concerned for Kinsey as she navigated the terrifying terrain that going undercover can be. The crimes committed by the antagonists in this story were interesting as it wasn’t a case of “this dude - or dudette - was killed, find out why.”

Overall, this is one of my favorite book series. I think Sue Grafton was incredibly clever and a great writer.

There are obviously some little things that ding the star rating, but really for the most part these books are very enjoyable. I’m always trying to guess where Kinsey is going show more with her line of thought in piecing the puzzle pieces together in her investigations. Sometimes I can see the direction it’s going to go and others I am pleasantly confused and pondering all the details and how they fit together. One of the things I like most about Grafton’s writing is that she can hing the whole plot on one tiny detail to an investigation. I’m sure that happens a lot in real investigations, but I find it so entertaining that Grafton wrote in such a way that these stories lend themselves to investigations rooted in reality. On the negative side of things, most of these books end a little too quickly for my taste. We can be trucking along to the climax of the story, the conflict happens, and the suddenly we’re at the end of the book within five minutes to the end of the audiobook (maybe about 10 pages in a physical copy?). Often the endings are abrupt and that’s a little off-putting for me.

I love that Grafton keeps her characters so realistic and grounded. Our protagonist isn’t some super powered private investigator or some heroin that’s had a rough past but trained to become as close to superhuman as possible in reality. No, Kinsey Millhone is just like the rest of us. I like that she’s got spunk, humor, sass, and a simplistic perspective on the world. It keeps things simple and clean, and that I feel is exactly who our Kinsey Millhone is in this series.

I started this series listening to the audiobook versions and I will probably keep “reading” them in this format. For about the first half of the series it is read by Mary Peiffer. Peiffer is not my favorite narrator but I believe my issues with her narrations are actually a sign of the times then. Audiobooks weren’t as prevalent back then and the rise of inflection and character voices were less common. This results in a very flat reading for much of Peiffer’s narrations. As the series goes along, she does begin to pitch her voice for characters as well as use inflections more. Unfortunately, she still sounds about twice the age of our main character and that’s a bit distracting. Now that I’m 11 books in though, I’ve gotten used to her as the voice of Kinsey. I’m not sure how well I will like it when it changes over to Judy Kaye in O is for Outlaw. show less