X by Sue GraftonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
It has been awhile since I've read any of Sue Grafton's alphabet mysteries and I'd forgotten how much I love Kinsey Milhone! The latest installment does not disappoint. As usual, Kinsey is juggling life and work in her normal methodical manner. She takes on a simple location job-- rich woman wants to reconnect to a son she gave up for adoption years ago. He's just gotten out of jail and she's lost track--wants to help him go straight and succeed. Simple $200 job--right?
Henry, her landlord, is obsessed with saving money on his water bill but actually, no, that isn't the issue--he wants to cut down on his water usage in anticipation of rationing as the drought intensifies in Santa Teresa Ca. He is also falling into the habit of running errands for the new elderly neighbors, since the man is confined to a wheelchair and his wife is his sole caregiver. Kinsey feels he's being taken advantage of and she has a strange feeling about the whole set-up.
A former colleague has died in an accident and his widow is asking Kinsey's help in organizing his files since she is being audited by the IRS. Kinsey didn't like the guy--thought he was a crook--but she is friends with the widow and wants to help her get the files sorted and most of them shredded and discarded. Among the papers is a large padded mailing envelop that Pete, the deceased, had secreted away. It contains a few mementoes of a woman, whose death seemed suspicious 30 years ago. They had been sent by the woman's friend to the local Catholic priest to be given the woman's daughter, now grown and married. Pete also left an encrypted list of the names of several women that he apparently was investigating--all somehow connected to the woman's husband. Kinsey decides to continue before turning the items over to the girl.
As usual all of these threads are nicely intertwined in the story that Kinsey tells the reader as though they were right along with her or waiting at Rosie's up the street with Henry to get the day's report. And, as usual, the story ends with all the threads tied off, sort of, anyway until next time in Y or Y Not? BTW, Grafton is too cute tossing X's all throughout the book--Teddy and Ari Xanakis, Father Xavier and even Pete's box of files marked on top with a large X !!
Now I have to go find the other Grafton's that are in one of the TBR piles around here.
This particular one was a GoodReads Uncorrected Proof Giveaway for review.
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