S is for Flashback? Cold Case?

That Violet Sullivan was a real piece of... work. It's small wonder that a woman like her - the town slut, bold and brassy a generation ahead of her time - simply disappeared one long weekend. Thirty-four years later, neither she nor that yappy Pomeranian of hers has ever been seen again..

Oh, back when Violet disappeared in her spanking-new '53 Chevrolet, there was an investigation. Some folks thought her abusive drunk of a husband did her in, but no one was ever certain. Some folks figured she took the $50,000 she was always hinting she had and simply disappeared. Her daughter Daisy never knew, but at this late date she's finally decided to get some of that all-holy closure (it is 1987, after all), so she hires one Kinsey Millhone to find the missing mama. Now you might think that more than three decades on a private eye wouldn't find anything to work with - especially since the authorities had investigated at the time - but you'd be wrong. It only takes Kinsey a day or two to open someone's old wounds, and another day to answer the first question: is Violet dead or alive?

Given that she's a sole practitioner without access to forensic labs and other high-powered tools, Kinsey oughta just give up - she's done what she came to do. But Ms Millhone is too nosy to quit - and Ms Grafton has another 150 pages to write - so you know that she'll suss out the villain. So who was the bad guy? Seeing as Violet was bedding every Tom, Jake, and Chet in town, there's no shortage of suspects; and Grafton makes sure we know that all of them can... mmm... operate the critical tool. Suffice it to say that you'll be kept guessing exactly as long as Millhone...


Nineteen Down, Seven to Go

From A is for Alibi to R is for Ricochet, fans of the femme not-so-fatale Kinsey Millhone have kept coming back for another helping, and Sue Grafton has continued to dish it out. Since this case finds our heroine out in the boonies instead of comfortably ensconced in her garage apartment, Grafton spares her readers Kinsey's usual visits to Rosie's and all the stock descriptions of her octogenarian landlord and his sex life. Out there in rodeo country, Kinsey doesn't even get a chance to don her one black all-purpose dress (good for either a funeral or a cocktail party), nor does anyone much care about her cutting her own hair with fingernail scissors. She doesn't even get to bemoan the complexities of her love life. Huzzah!

Instead of padding out the narrative with the usual minutiae of Kinsey's life (three miles in the morning, empty fridge, etc.), Grafton interleaves the present-day (1987, actually) investigation with flashbacks to the events leading up to Violet's disappearance. The 1953 cast of characters plays out against their much older selves, with some surprising twists: the lumpish fourteen-year-old with a crush on the slender college boy is now a forty-something hardbody married to him - and he's now the lumpish one. Secrets of small-town life are revealed under Kinsey's gentle tutelage, and a few old scores are settled - you might even find it mildly interesting to picture a sixty-plus 300-pound bouncer kick the snot out of an equally senior drunk.


A Mystery, A Mystery...

It took climbing on the cold-case bandwagon to extract some of the Kinseyania from this chapter in the alphabet series, but perhaps it was worth it. There remain, however, problems with the construction of the mystery itself. Grafton never quite gets a handle on time, for one thing - for instance, would hydrangeas still survive in a garden abandoned for thirty years (in the southern California climate)? I doubt it. Likewise, a series of anachronisms continually interrupts the narrative's flow: for instance, the three-cent stamp never gave way directly to the five-cent stamp; no one in 1953 had ever heard of a "minimart"; and it's a pretty safe bet that in 1987 no small-town Chevrolet dealership had a vending machine for coffee, cappuccino, and lattes. And while we're at it, 200 cubic yards is about the size of a commuter jet, not a passenger car.

Then there's Kinsey's epiphany about where Violet came to rest - the "iron in the soil makes hydrangea blossoms blue" clue has been used three or four times in recent books. Couldn't Grafton come up with something new?


Still and All...

The past few alphabet-soup mysteries have been so pro forma and Kinsey so irritatingly unlikable, that even Grafton's cold-case bandwagon leap and sloppy research are a welcome change. Fans of the romantic aspects of the Millhone series will certainly feel shortchanged - Kinsey doesn't even get a kiss - but fans of mysteries will feel much more comfortable in Santa Teresa than they have in a long, long time. For pulling herself out of the relationship trap, a grudging four stars for Sue Grafton and S is for Silence.



More Kinsey:


O is for Outlaw
P is for Peril
R is for Ricochet