A is for Alibi - Sue Grafton

   1982; 308 pages.  New Author? : No.  Book 1 (out of 25) in the “Kinsey Millhone” series.  Genres: Private Investigator Mystery; Hard-Boiled Mystery.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

 

    It promises to be a easy but strange case for PI Kinsey Millhone.  Nikki Fife wants her to investigate the killing of her late husband, Laurence Fife.  That sounds fairly routine, but there are a couple of weird aspects.

 

    First off, this is a cold case, since Laurence’s death occurred quite some time ago.  Nikki was accused and convicted of murdering him and has just been released from prison after serving eight years.  During her incarceration she never attempted to initiate an investigation.  So why start one now?

 

    Secondly, Laurence was killed in a most unusual way: he was poisoned via oleander, ground up into a powder, then slipped into one of the medication tablets he was taking.  Outside of his wife, who would have access to his medicines?

 

    Nonetheless, Nikki is willing to pay handsomely for Kinsey’s efforts.  And it turns out lots of people hated Laurence for lots of reasons, most of them involving infidelity.  So there are lots of suspects for Kinsey to look into.

 

    And since she’s already served her time, Nikki wouldn’t have reason to want further investigating, unless she actually innocent, amiright?

 

What’s To Like...

    A is for Alibi is the first book in Sue Grafton’s popular “Alphabet Series”, published over the course of 35 years, and closing with Y is for Yesterday.  Sadly, Ms. Grafton passed away before writing the “Z” installment.

 

    Despite it being a cold case, things quickly get complicated.  Kinsey discovers there was a second oleander-poisoning death back around the time of Laurence’s demise.  More chilling, and more timely, one of the present suspects is murdered right after Kinsey contacts her.  Someone is worried about the new probe.

 

    A is for Alibi was published in 1982 and it was fun to note some of the bygone things mentioned:  cameras needed a roll of film; a room at a cheap hotel only cost $11.95 per night; college students used “blue books” when taking exams; and dial phones could be slammed down to terminate a conversation.  I was happy to see one of my alma maters, Arizona State University, get mentioned, and smiled when it was revealed that one of the characters created crossword puzzles as a pastime. 

 

    A key break comes courtesy of a child's offhand remark.  I'm proud to say I picked up on that, but I couldn’t connect the dots.  Fortunately, Kinsey could, but even so, another plot twist jumped up and roiled the waters again.  Things wrap up with an obligatory chase scene; with the bad folks getting their deserved comeuppance and all the killings being solved.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.1*/5, based on 13,431 ratings and 1,563 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.86*/5, based on 184,374 ratings and 5,811 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    He was thirty-nine years old when he died.  That Nikki was accused, tried, and convicted was just a piece of bad luck.  Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they’re right—a chilling thought when you sit down to dinner with a family of five.  All those potential killers passing their plates.  (pg. 8)

 

    Claremont is an oddity in that it resembles a trim little midwestern hamlet with elms and picket fences.  The annual Fourth of July parade is composed of kazoo bands, platoons of children on crepe-paper-decorated bikes, and a self-satirizing team of husbands dressed in Bermuda shorts, black socks, and business shoes doing close-order drills with power mowers.  Except for the smog, Claremont could even be considered “picturesque” with Mount Baldy forming a raw backdrop.  (pg. 162)

 

“The only cleavage I got left, I sit on.”  (pg. 31)

    The cussing is light: just 11 cases in the first 20% of the book.  One of those was an f-bomb though; and later on, there are a couple rolls-in-the-hay plus two instances of profane terms being used to describe sensual parts of the body.

 

    I had a couple quibbles, but they’re minor.  The ending, although suitably exciting, is rather conveniently resolved by Kinsey simply firing first.  And throughout the tale, the storyline goes off on a tangent of Kinsey working on a unrelated case.  I kept waiting for it to somehow tie into the main plot thread, but it never did.

 

    As a first effort, A is for Alibi is a promising tale, with enough action and intrigue to keep me turning the pages.  This was my second Kinsey Millhone book (the other one is reviewed here), and I get the sense that the author hones her writing skills nicely as the series progresses.  I have a bunch more of her works on my Kindle and TBR shelf, and look forward to more books in this series.

 

    7½ Stars.  An interesting sidelight, courtesy of the Wikipedia article for A is for Alibi.  Sue Grafton was going through a divorce while writing this book, and admits about her husband that she “would lie in bed at night thinking of ways to kill him.”   Oy.

Q Is For Quarry - Sue Grafton

    2003; 408 pages.  Book 17 (out of 25) in the Kinsey Millhone Alphabet series  New Author? : Yes.  Murder-Mystery; Police Procedural; Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction; Cold Case.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    As far as cold cases go, this one’s in deep-freeze.  Eighteen years ago, a young (fifteen- to twenty-year-old) woman was stabbed multiple times, had her throat slashed, and was dumped down the side of a little-used country road outside Santa Teresa, California.  Her body remained undiscovered for quite some time, and was badly decomposed by the time it was found.  There was no identification on her, and although the police investigated it as best they could, they soon exhausted all the leads.

    Now two of the detectives that handled the case want to reopen it.  They’re both up in years and have health issues, so they’ve asked 36-year-old Kinsey Millhone, a private investigator, to assist them.  Maybe a new set of eyes, looking over the old reports and evidence, can find some new angle to probe.  Old cops don’t like to leave unsolved cases on their record.

    There’s even less evidence to study now; all that’s left of the body are the upper and lower jawbones.  Some of the other detectives who were in on the case have moved on, but there are police reports to re-read and persons-of-interest to re-interview.  Already, one aspect of the case has Kinsey puzzled.

    How come no missing person alert was ever matched up with the victim?

What’s To Like...

    Q Is For Quarry is my first Sue Grafton novel, despite it being the “Q” book in her Alphabet series.  I was delighted to find it to be a “police procedural”, as that’s probably my favorite type of murder-mystery.  Kinsey is the protagonist in the series, and the books are written in the first-person POV, hers.

    Kinsey’s stomping ground is the fictional city of Santa Teresa, California, presumably a suburb in the greater Los Angeles area.  Q is For Quarry starts there, but later shifts to the California-Arizona border, for reasons that would be spoilers.  I liked Sue Grafton’s attention to the titular “Q”: in addition to the double-meaning of “Quarry” (the rock place and another word for ‘prey’), there was a “Q Street” and a fictional town called Quorum.  Quartzite, Arizona also gets mentioned; it’s real, it’s close to California, but our heroes never make it across the state border.

    The story is set in 1987, and it was fun to see how much life has changed since then.  The police records were in microfilm format; there was no such thing as a cell phone (except for Maxwell Smart’s shoe); Kinsey lugs a portable typewriter with her wherever she goes; she also uses a Polaroid camera that can spit out a developed photograph; the minimum wage was $3.35/hour; gas stations offer full-service (although that was on its way out); and refrigerators had plastic ice trays, not built-in ice-makers.

    The dialogue is often witty, and I chuckled at the smidgen of French: “Quelle bummeur!”  There’s quite a bit of cussing, which fits in well with the gritty tone of life in the police force.  The storyline stays focused: first find out the identity of the victim, then figure out who killed her and why.  Being a police procedural, there are investigative dead ends and lots of persons-of-interest, many of which are hiding secrets that may or may not be relevant to the crime.  There’s more intrigue than thrills-&-spills, yet I still found Q Is For Quarry to be a page-turner.  That speaks well of Sue Grafton’s writing skills.

    The ending is a spike in the excitement level, although the presence of the firearm seemed just a tad bit convenient.  All the story threads are tied up nicely by the close of the book.  Q is For Quarry is a standalone story, as well as part of a series.  By not reading these books in order I’m clueless about the details of the family drama that Kinsey is embroiled in, and I don’t know which of the characters are recurring.  But that didn’t stop me from thoroughly enjoying my initiation into this series.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Widow’s Walk (n.; phrase) : a railed or balustraded platform built on a roof, originally in early New England houses, typically for providing an unimpeded view of the sea.

Excerpts...

    “You know much about the desert?”

    “I’ve picked up the occasional odd fact, but that’s about it.”

    “I’ve been reading about scorpions.  Book claims they’re the first air-breathing animal.  They have a rudimentary brain, but their eyesight’s poor.  They probably don’t perceive anything they can’t actually touch first.  You see two scorpions together, they’re either making love or one of them is being eaten by the other.  There’s a lesson in there somewhere, but I can’t figure out what.  Probably has to do with the nature of true love.”  (loc. 2707)

    “Cathy Lee came on to him.  She was a gold digger, pure and simple.  All moody and temperamental.  Frankie said she was violent, especially when she drank, which she’d been doing that night.  She turned on him just like that.”  Iona snapped her fingers.  “Came at him with a pair of scissors, so what was he supposed to do, let her jam the blades through his throat?”

    Dolan’s expression was bland.  “He could have grabbed her wrist.  It seems somewhat excessive to stab her fourteen times.  You’d think once or twice would have done the job.”  (loc. 2804, and not a spoiler.)

Kindle Details...

    Q Is For Quarry presently sells for $4.99 at Amazon, although I've seen it discounted once or twice.  The other books in the series go for $4.99-$13.99, with most of them priced at either $8.99 (the older ones) or $9.99 (the newer ones), and one or two only $4.99.

“You’d think someone would notice a ‘Cathy Lee Pearse’ with no boobs, a mustache, and a two-day growth of beard.”  (loc. 501)

    Sue Grafton died in December 2017, just one book shy of completing her 26-book “Alphabet” series; the last one being titled “Y is for Yesterday”.  The only one that doesn’t conform to the * is For * format is the “X” book.

    According to Wikipedia, there will never be a “Z” entry.  Sue Grafton was not keen on anyone ghost-writing her stories posthumously.  She was also against selling the TV and/or movie rights to anyone, so don’t look for a film version of any of these coming to a screen near you anytime soon.

    Personally, I think her standing by her principles about these things is kind of neat.

    8½ Stars.  Be sure to read the Author’s Note at the back of the book. Q is For Quarry is based on an actual cold case that happened in Santa Barbara County in 1969, thirty-three years before Sue Grafton penned this book.  She provides a number of details about that case, including a digital reconstruction of the victim’s face, somehow developed from only her two jawbones (the mandible and the maxilla).  Four pictures of “Jane Doe’s” face are included in the book.