J Is for Judgment

Solid entry in the series. Investigation with Kinsey taking some silly chances at the beginning and the end, but the tension and danger levels are kept relatively low. This is more about the characters and how their lives are affected by the actions of a lousy businessman turned con man. Kinsey becomes a sounding board for most of them, including a murderer, though murder is not the driver of the story. On the side, Kinsey discovers she has cousins she never knew -- or wanted to know -- about. This is set in place but left for future books to explore.

Recommended for Grafton fans.

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.



Solid mystery. Lots of twists and turns. This is also the book in which Kinsey finds she has living family. A woman she meets while canvassing asks if she's a Kinsey from Lompoc. Kinsey is pretty anxious and unsure about being part of a family but she steels herself to at least do some research to find out. In the meantime though, her cousins get in touch with her. The whole story isn't revealed yet but the initial contact has been made. William and Rosie get engaged - or at least William proposes - not sure if Rosie says yes or not yet. Kinsey is her usual badass self. Struggling with her good angel/bad devil personality - hmm should I break in? Well...I've been so lawful up until my earlier break-in, so what's one more for the night? Lol.



3 stars. show less

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

More about Kinsey’s history in this one. I really liked how that was brought to life as well as how Kinsey responded to it. On point for her character in my opinion. I enjoyed this book but the actual case of the book was a bit on the lackluster side. Had we not found out more of Kinsey’s origins in this one I might be inclined to rate it lower. In all, it’s a good installment to the whole series though.

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. show more I’m always trying to guess where Kinsey is going 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

Wow. This was a really good one to sink your teeth into. We have Kinsey showing why she is really a good investigator and her also having to deal with changes to her professional life. I thought the writing was great as well as the flow of the book. The ending comes with a very nice gut punch too. What is great though is that some of these characters pop up in a later book.

In "J is for Judgment" Kinsey is asked to investigate if Wendell Jaffe is still alive. This is an issue because years ago, Wendell Jaffe disappeared, believed to die at sea. Too bad this happened before he disappeared after taking a lot of investors money with him. Kinsey works for an insurance company which is asking her to go where Jaffe is presumed to be hiding show more out (in Mexico) and get evidence he is still alive.

Kinsey ends up becoming wrapped in the lives of Jaffe's family (two sons and a wife) who struggled to go on after he was presumed dead. Now collecting the insurance money should help their lives out. And one of Jaffe's sons has a problem that really is going to need a lot of money to deal with.

Kinsey feels a lot more freer to me in this one. We get to see how she was able to track down Jaffe and how she went about tying all of the pieces together once she returns back to Santa Theresa. We still get updates on characters like Henry and Rosie. We also get a really good look at Kinsey's history. We know her Aunt Gin raised her, but now we get even more details that leads to more questions about her past for Kinsey.

I loved the writing and flow. Sometimes the flow can get dragged down when Grafton tried to juggle too many things, but this one was really well done.

I always love these books for being set pre-cell phone and computer age era (the 1980s). We see Kinsey using her brain a lot and her piecing things together with her notecards (or her deduction cards).

The ending was a surprise. We are led to one mystery with Kinsey giving us readers a partial answer. I am so sad we will never get to see Z is for Zero. But it's fun re-reading this series. show less

I think the thing I liked most about this book was that we see Millhone struggle with the intro of her family. It wasn't "enter long lost cousin, stage left, *happy happy joy joy*." Instead she feels the lash of it but ends up working on it in her terms. She's honest with her cousin and she wants to be taken as she is, that's her standard for dealing with the sudden arrival of family and all that it infers. I think there's a lot of people out there that would like to be taken "as is" by family members; I believe that it was one of the most relatable moments in the books so far. The mystery itself had me a little disappointed. It just seemed to drag and fall flat in some areas. I found myself wishing there was more to work with show more concerning Dana and the boys. It seems like the mysteries in the books where Millhone is confronted by personal issues fall to the background when they could end up having much more punch to them in areas. So, as a whole, it was adequate; on the personal front, it was wonderful. show less

Another one of those where I didn’t really like any of the characters, they weren’t as bad as the characters in “D is for Deadbeat” but still kind of unlikable. Given that most of them have some past experience with Wendell Jaffe the reasons for the actions a little more understandable.

The best part of this book was all the insight we gained into how Kinsey thinks and her moral code. I really admire her drive for the truth and the value she places on human life – any human life. She really wanted to know the truth about Wendell Jaffe and couldn’t understand why everyone else was happy with accepting what appeared on the surface.

The one big moment this book gave us and it gave it to us big time was the information on show more Kinsey’s family. It is hard to review this portion of the book without spoiling it for readers who have not read the series. I will just say that if the book had spent more time on that I would have probably rated it higher. What a revelation and an added aspect to her personality. show less

Spoiler last paragraph. Good up to then.

This was my first Sue Grafton. It wasn’t bad although I didn’t realize that Kinsey Millhone is a serial sleuth. She was interesting in a detached sort of way. She went about her craft with a ‘this is what it takes’ attitude, even if she didn’t particularly like it or was forced into a situation because of her own stupidity.

I normally don’t start with ‘serial mysteries’ in the middle because I think I’ve lost continuity if I do that. I noticed that this writer didn’t fill in the details of the past that she may have gone over in previous books. I’m reading a Marcus Didius Falco mystery again and that writer is doing just that. It makes me, the serial reader feel somewhat show more exasperated having to listen to all that again.

I liked the ending when Kinsey figures out that it was Jaffe’s girlfriend Renata who actually did kill him. When Renata throws herself naked into the pacific and begins to swim out, Kinsey follows but only so far. Afterwards, Kinsey ruminates about the case and thinks that Renata may have done this before. No one witnessed her dead husband’s death in Spain and there are no records that his body ever was shipped here. She could make herself disappear and no one would be the wiser. show less