Sue Grafton Books In Order

A is for Alibi

When Laurence Fife was murdered, few mourned his passing. A prominent divorce attorney with a reputation for single minded ruthlessness on behalf of his clients, Fife was also rumored to be a dedicated philanderer. Plenty of people in the picturesque southern California town of Santa Teresa had a reason to want him dead. Including, thought the cops, his young and beautiful wife, Nikki. With motive, access, and opportunity, Nikki was their number one suspect. The jury thought so, too. Eight years later and out on parole, Niki Fife hires Kinsey Millhone to find out who really killed her late husband.A trail that is eight years cold. A trail that reaches out to enfold a bitter, wealthy, and foul mouthed old woman and a young boy, born deaf, whose memory cannot be trusted. A trail that leads to a lawyer defensively loyal to a dead partner and disarmingly attractive to Millhone; to an ex wife, brave, lucid, lovely and still angry over Fife’s betrayal of her; to a not so young secretary with too high a salary for too few skills and too many debts left owing: The trail twists to include them all, with Millhone following every turn until it finally twists back on itself and she finds herself face to face with a killer cunning enough to get away with murder.

B is for Burglar

Beverly Danziger looked like an expensive, carefully wrapped package from a good but conservative shop. Only her compulsive chatter hinted at the nervousness beneath her cool surface. It was a nervousness out of all proportion to the problem she placed before Kinsey Millhone. There was an absent sister. A will to be settled a matter of only a few thousand dollars. Mrs. Danziger did not look as if she needed a few thousand dollars. And she didn’t seem like someone longing for a family reunion. Still, business was slow, and even a private investigator has bills to pay. Millhone took the job. It looked routine. Elaine Boldt’s wrappings were a good deal flashier than her sister’s, but they signaled the same thing: The lady had money. A rich widow in her early forties, she owned a condo in Boca Raton and another in Santa Teresa. According to the manager of the California building, she was last seen draped in her $12,000 lynx coat heading for Boca Raton. According to the manager of the Florida building, she never got there. But someone else had and she was camping out illegally in Mrs. Boldt’s apartment. The job was beginning to seem a bit less routine. It turned tricky when Beverly Danziger ordered Millhone to drop the case and it took on an ominous quality when Aubrey Danziger surfaced, making all kinds of wild accusations about his wife. But it only became sinister when Millhone learned that just days before Elaine Boldt went missing, her next door neighbor and bridge partner had been murdered and the killer was still at large.A house destroyed by arson. A brutally murdered a woman. A missing lynx coat. An apartment burgled of valueless papers, another ransacked in a mel e of mindless destruction. And more murder. As Millhone digs deeper into the case, she finds herself in a nightmarish hall of mirrors in which reality is distorted by illusion and nothing except danger is quite what it seems.

C Is for Corpse

He was young maybe twenty or so and he must once have been a good looking kid. Kinsey could see that. But now his body was covered in scars, his face half collapsed. It saddened Kinsey and made her curious. She could see he was in a lot of pain. But for three weeks, as Kinsey’d watched him him doggedly working out at the local gym, putting himself through a grueling exercise routine, he never spoke. Then one Monday morning when there was no one else in the gym, Bobby Callahan approached her. His story was hard to credit: a murderous assault by a tailgating car on a lonely rural road, a roadside smash into a canyon 400 feet below, his Porsche a bare ruin, his best friend dead. The doctors had managed to put his body back together again sort of. His mother’s money had seen to that. What they couldn’t fix was his mind, couldn’t restore the huge chunks of memory wiped out by the crash. Bobby knew someone had tried to kill him, but he didn’t know why. He knew he had the key to something that made him dangerous to the killer, but he didn’t know what it was. And he sensed that someone was still out there, ready to pounce at the first sign his memory was coming back. He’d been to the cops, but they’d shrugged off his story. His family thought he had a screw loose. But he was scared scared to death. He wanted to hire Kinsey. His case didn’t have a whole lot going for it, but he was hard to resist: young, brave, hurt. She took him on. And three days later, Bobby Callahan was dead. Kinsey Millhone never welshed a deal. She’d been hired to stop a killing. Now she’d find the killer.

D is for Deadbeat

He called himself Alvin Limardo, and the job he had for Kinsey was cut and dried: locate a kid who’d done him a favor and pass on a check for $25,000. It was only later, after he’d stiffed her for her retainer, that Kinsey found out his name was Daggett. John Daggett. Ex con. Inveterate liar. Chronic drunk. And dead. The cops called it an accident death by drowning. Kinsey wasn’t so sure. Pulled into the detritus of a dead man’s life, Kinsey soon realizes that Daggett had an awful lot of enemies. There’s the daughter who grew up with a cheating drunk for a father, and the wife who’s become a religious nut in response to an intolerable marriage. There’s the lady who thought she was Mrs. Daggett and has the bruises to prove it only to discover the legal Mrs. D. And there are the drug dealers out $25,000. But most of all, there are the families of the five people John Daggett killed, victims of his wild, drunken driving. The D.A. called it vehicular manslaughter and put him away for two years. The families called it murder and had very good reason to want John Daggett dead. Deft, cunning, and clever, this latest Millhone mystery also confronts some messy truths, for, as Kinsey herself says, ‘Some debts of the human soul are so enormous only life itself is sufficient forfeit’ but as she’d be the first to admit, murder is not a socially acceptable solution.

E is for Evidence

It was the silly season and a Monday at that, and Kinsey Millhone was bogged down in a preliminary report on a fire claim. Something was nagging at her, but she couldn’t pin it. The last thing she needed in the morning mail was a letter from her bank recording an erroneous $5,000 deposit in her account. Kinsey had never believed in Santa Claus and she wasn’t about to change her mind now. Resigning herself to a morning of frustration, she phoned the bank and, assaulted by canned carols, waited on hold for an officer to clear up the snafu. It was with something less than Christmas cheer that Kinsey faced off only minutes later with California Fidelity’s Mac Voorhies. Voorhies was smart, humorless, stingy with praise, and totally fair. He was frowning now.’I got a phone call this morning.’ he said, his frown deepening. ‘Somebody says you’re on the take.’Suddenly the $5,000 deposit clicked into place. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a setup.’E’ is for evidence: evidence planted, evidence lost. ‘E’ is for ex lovers and evasions, enemies and endings. For Kinsey, ‘E’ is for everything she stands to lose if she can’t exonerate herself: her license, her livelihood, her good name. And so she takes on a new client: namely, Kinsey Millhone, thirty two and twice divorced, ex cop and wisecracking loner, a California private investigator with a penchant for lost causes one of which, it is to be hoped, is not herself. As Kinsey begins to unravel the frame up, she finds that her future is intimately tied to one family’s past and to the explosive secret it has protected for almost twenty years. Digging deeper, she discovers that probing the past can have lethal consequences as she follows a trail of murder that leads to her own front door. And in what may well be her most challenging case, Kinsey comes up against the fact that sometimes, ‘E’ is forever.

F is for Fugitive

Floral Beach wasn’t much of a town: six streets long and three deep, its only notable feature a strip of sand fronting the Pacific. It was on that sandy beach seventeen years ago that the strangled body of Jean Timberlake had been found. The people of floral Beach didn’t pay a whole lot of mind to past history, especially when Bailey Fowler, the self confessed killer, had been properly processed and convicted. They weren’t even unduly concerned when, a year after the murder, Fowler walked away from the men’s prison at San Luis Obispo, never to be seen again. After all, everyone knew Jean had been a wild kid. ‘Like mother, like daughter,’ some said though never within hearing of Shana Timberlake, who, whatever her faults, still mourned her murdered child. And then, by sheer fluke, the cops stumbled on Bailey Fowler. And a case seventeen years dead came murderously to life again. For Royce Fowler, old and sick with not much time left, his son’s reappearance was the chance to heal an old wound. For Kinsey Millhone, the case was a long shot, but she agreed to take it on. She couldn’t know then it would lead her to probe the passions buried just below the surface of family relations, where old wounds fester and the most cherished emotions become warped until they fuse into deadly, soul destroying time bombs.

G is for Gumshoe

‘One of the sassiest, most appealing of the recent spate of female gunshoes…
‘G’ is for glorious, galloping read, and I can’t wait for ‘H’ .’ Louise Bernikow, CosmopolitanGood and bad things seem to be coming in threes for Kinsey Millhone: on her thirty third birthday she moves back into her renovated apartment, gets hired to find an elderly lady supposedly living in the Mojave Desert by herself, and makes the top of ex con Tyrone Patty’s hit list. It’s the last that convinces Kinsey even she can’t handle whoever’s been hired to whack her, and she gets herself a bodyguard: Robert Dietz, a Porsche driving P.I. who takes guarding Kinsey’s body very seriously. With Dietz watching her for the merest sign of her usual recklessness, Kinsey plunges into her case. And before it’s over, she’ll unearth the gruesome truth about a long buried betrayal and, in the process, come fact to face with her own mortality…
. ‘Wit is the most versatile weapon in Sue Grafton’s well stocked arsenal, and she uses it with disarming precision…
. Grafton excels in this milieu.’ Newsweek’The story is complex; the body count high; the sexual encounters feverish; and the villains chilling in another can’t put it down outing for this talented author.’ Kirkus ReviewsFrom the Paperback edition.

H is for Homicide

His name was Parnell Perkins, and until shortly after midnight, he’d been a claims adjustor for California Fidelity. Then someone came along and put paid to that line of work. And to any other. Parnell Perkins had been shot at close range and left for dead in the parking lot outside California Fidelity’s offices. To the cops, it looked like a robbery gone sour. To Kinsey Millhone, it looked like the cops were walking away from the case. She didn’t like the idea that a colleague and sometime drinking companion had been murdered. Or the idea that his murderer was loose and on the prowl. It made her feel exposed. Vulnerable. Bibianna Diaz was afraid for her life. If there was one thing she knew for sure, it was that you didn’t cross Raymond Maldonado and live to tell the tale. And Bibianna had well and truly crossed him, running out on his crazy wedding plans and going into hiding in Santa Teresa light years away from the Los Angeles barrio that was home turf to Raymond and his gang. Now she needed money to buy time, to make sure she’d put enough space between them. And the quickest way she knew to get money was to work an insurance scam just like the ones Raymond was running down in L.A. The trouble was, Bibianna picked California Fidelity as her mark. And it wasn’t long before her name surfaced in one of Parnell Perkins’s open files and Kinsey was on her case. But so, too, was her spurned suitor, Raymond Maldonado. He had a rap sheet as long as his arm, a hair trigger temper that was best left untested, and an inability to take no for an answer. He also had Tourette’s syndrome, which did nothing to smooth out the kinks in his erratic and often violent behavior. All in all, Raymond Maldonado was not someone to spend a lot of time hanging out with. Unfortunately for Kinsey, she didn’t have a lot of choice in the mater. Not after the love sick Raymond kidnapped Bibianna. Like it or not, Kinsey was stuck babysitting Bibianna along with Raymond and his macho crew. You might say she was a prisoner of love. It may be Kinsey Millhone’s most complicated and risk filled case. It certainly is Sue Grafton’s wittiest venture into low life crime. It’s ‘H’ is for Homicide, and it confirms yet again that Kinsey Millhone is ‘a wonderful character, tough but not brutish, resourceful and sensitive, a fit knight to walk those mean streets with her male predecessors’ the Los Angeles Times and that Sue Grafton is ‘a heads up delight’ Detroit News.

I is for Innocent

Readers of Sue Grafton’s fiction know she never writes the same book twice, and ‘I’ Is For Innocent is no exception. Her most intricately plotted novel to date, it is layered in enough complexity to baffle even the cleverest among us. Lonnie Kingman is in a bind. He’s smack in the middle of assembling a civil suit, and the private investigator who was doing his pretrial legwork has just dropped dead of a heart attack. In a matter of weeks the court’s statute of limitations will put paid to his case. Five years ago David Barney walked when a jury acquitted him of the murder of his rich wife, Isabelle. Now Kingman, acting as attorney for the dead woman’s ex husband and their child and sure that the jury made a serious mistake, is trying to divest David Barney of the profits of that murder. But time is running out, and David Barney still swears he’s innocent. Patterned along the lines of a legal case, ‘I’ Is For Innocent is seamlessly divided into thirds: one third of the novel is devoted to the prosecution, one third to the defense, and a final third to cross examination and rebuttal. The result is a trial novel without a trial and a crime novel that resists solution right to the end. When Kinsey Millhone agrees to take over Morley Shine’s investigation, she thinks it is a simple matter of tying up the loose ends. Morley might have been careless about his health, but he was an old pro at the business. So it comes as a real shock when she finds his files in disarray, his key informant less than credible, and his witnesses denying ever having spoken with him. It comes as a bigger shock when she finds that every claim David Barney has made checks out. But if Barney didn’t murder his wife, who did? It would seem the list of candidates is a long one. In life, Isabelle Barney had stepped on a lot of toes. In ‘I’ Is For Innocent, Sue Grafton once again demonstrates her mastery of those telling details that reveal our most intimate and conflicted relationships. As Kinsey comments on the give and take by which we humans deal with each other, for better and sometimes for worse, the reader is struck yet again by how acute a social observer Ms. Grafton can be. Frequently funny and sometimes caustic, she is also surprisingly compassionate understanding how little in life is purely black and white. Except for murder. Somewhere out there, a killer waits to see just what Kinsey will find out. Somewhere out there, someone’s been getting away with murder, and this time it just might turn out to be Kinsey’s.’I’ Is For Innocent is Sue Grafton in peak form. Fast paced. Funny. And very, very devious.

J is for Judgment

‘J’ is for Jaffe: Wendell Jaffe, dead these past five years. Or so it seemed until his former insurance agent spotted him in the bar of a dusty little resort halfway between Cabo San Lucas and La Paz.’In truth, the facts about Wendell Jaffe had nothing to do with my family history, but murder is seldom tidy and no one ever said revelations operate in a straight line. It was my investigation into the dead man’s past that triggered the inquiry into my own, and in the end the two stories became difficult to separate.’Five years ago, when Jaffe’s thirty five foot Fuji ketch was found drifting off the Baja coast, it seemed a sure thing he’d gone overboard. The note he left behind admitted he was flat broke, his business bankrupt, his real estate gambit nothing but a huge Ponzi scheme about to collapse, with criminal indictment certain to follow. When the authorities soon after descended on his banks and his books, there was nothing left: Jaffe had stripped the lot.’Given my insatiable curiosity and my natural inclination to poke my nose in where it doesn’t belong, it was odd to realize how little attention I’d paid to my own past. I’d simply accepted what I was told, constructing my personal mythology on the flimsiest of facts.’But Jaffe wasn’t quite without assets. There was the $500,000 life insurance policy made out to his wife and underwritten by California Fidelity. With no corpse to prove death, however, the insurance company was in no hurry to pay the claim. Dana Jaffe had to wait out the statutory five years until her missing husband could be declared legally dead. Just two months before Wendell Jaffe was sighted in that dusty resort bar, California Fidelity finally paid in full. Now they wanted the truth. And they were willing to hire Kinsey Millhone to dig it up. As Kinsey pushes deeper into the mystery surrounding Wendell Jaffe’s pseudocide, she explores her own past, discovering that in family matters as in crime, sometimes it’s better to reserve judgment.’J’ is for judgment: the kind we’re quick to make and often quicker to regret.’J’ Is for Judgment: Kinsey Millhone’s tenth excursion into the dark places of the heart where duplicity is the governing rule and murder the too frequent result.

K is for Killer

Lorna Kepler was beautiful and willful, a loner who couldn’t resist flirting with danger. Maybe that’s what killed her. Her death had raised a host of tough questions. The cops suspected homicide, but they could find neither motive nor suspect. Even the means were mysterious: Lorna’s body was so badly decomposed when it was discovered that they couldn’t be certain she hadn’t died of natural causes. In the way of overworked cops everywhere, the case was gradually shifted to the back burner and became another unsolved file. Only Lorna’s mother kept it alive, consumed by the certainty that somebody out there had gotten away with murder. In the ten months since her daughter’s death, Janice Kepler had joined a support group, trying to come to terms with her loss and her anger. It wasn’t helping. And so, leaving a session one evening and noticing a light on in the offices of Millhone Investigations, she knocked on the door. In answering that knock, Kinsey Millhone is pulled into the netherworld of unavenged murder, where only a pact with the devil will satisfy the restless ghosts of the victims and give release to the living they have left behind. Eleven books into the series that has won her readers around the world, Sue Grafton takes a darkside turn, pitching us into a shadow land of pain and grief where killers still walk free, unaccused, unpunished, unrepentant. With ‘K’ is for Killer she offers a tale that is dark, complex, and deeply disturbing.

L is for Lawless

Kinsey’s skills are about to be sorely tested. She is about to meet her duplicitous match in a couple of world class prevaricators who quite literally take her for the ride of her life.’L’is for Lawless: Call it Kinsey Millhone in bad company. Call it a mystery without a murder, a treasure hunt without a map, a quest novel with truly mixed up motives. Call it the return of Kinsey as bad girl quick witted and quicksilvery king her nose into everyone’s dirty laundry as she joins up with a modern day Bonnie and Clyde in an Our Gang comedy that will take her halfway across the country and leave her with a major headache and an empty bank balance. America’s favorite borderline delinquent is back with her one liners on tap and her energy level on high, romping through her fastest and funniest adventure in this, her twelfth foray into the alphabet of crime. Judy Kaye has appeared on Broadway in Oh, Brother; Grease; and On the Twentieth Century; and won a Tony Award for her performance in The Phantom of the Opera. She is the reader of Sue Grafton’s entire Alphabet Mystery Series from Random House AudioBooks. Look for other titles in the Alphabet Mystery Series from Random House AudioBooks.’L’ is for Lawless is available in hardcover from Henry Holt and Company Inc.

M is for Malice

4 cassettes / 4 hoursRead by Judy Kaye’There are few writers able to sustain the solid mixture of detection, narrative energy and cultural observations that one finds in Grafton.’ Washington Post Book World’M’ is for money. Lots of it. ‘M’ is for Malek Construction, the $40 million company that grew out of modest soil to become one of the big three in California construction, one of the few still in family hands.’M’ is for the Malek family: four sons now nearing middle age who stand to inherit a fortune four men with very different outlooks, temperaments, and needs, linked only by blood and money. Eighteen years ago, one of them angry, troubled, and in trouble went missing.’M’ is for Millhone, hired to trace that missing black sheep brother.’M’ is for memories, none of them happy. The bitter memoirs of an embattled family. This prodigal son will find no welcome at his family’s table. ‘M’ is for malice. And in brutal consequence, ‘M’ is for murder, the all too common outcome of familiar hatreds.’M’ is for malice…
and malice kills.

N Is For Noose

Kinsey Millhone should have done something else–she should have turned the car in the direction of home. Instead, she was about to put herself in the gravest jeopardy of her career.

Tom Newquist had been a detective in the Nota Lake sheriff’s office–a tough, honest cop respected by everyone. When he died suddenly, the townsfolk were saddened but not surprised: Just shy of sixty-five, Newquist worked too hard, smoked too much, and exercised too little. That plus an appetite for junk food made him a poster boy for an American Heart Association campaign. Newquist’s widow didn’t doubt the coroner’s report. But what Selma couldn’t accept was not knowing what had so bothered Tom in the last six weeks of his life. What was it that had made him prowl restlessly at night, that had him brooding constantly? Selma Newquist wanted closure, and the only way she’d get it was if she found out what it was that had so bedeviled her husband. Kinsey should have dumped the case. It was vague and hopeless, like looking for a needle in a haystack. Instead, she set up shop in Nota Lake, where she found that looking for a needle in a haystack can draw blood. Very likely, her own.’N’ Is for Noose: a novel in which Kinsey Millhone becomes the target and an entire town seems in for the kill.

O Is for Outlaw

‘First there was a phone call from a stranger, then a letter showed up fourteen years after it was sent. That’s how I learned. I’d made a serious error in judgement and ended up risking my life…
‘ The call comes on a Monday morning from a guy who scavenges defaulted storage units at auction. Last weekend he bought a stack. They had stuff in them Kinsey stuff. For thirty bucks, he’ll sell her the lot. Kinsey’s never been one for personal possessions, but curiousity wins out and she hands over a twenty she may be curious but she loves a bargain. What she finds amid childhood memorabilia is an old undelivered letter. It will force her to re examine her beliefs about the break up of her first marriage, about the honour of her first husband, about an old unsolved murder. And it will put her life in the gravest peril. ‘A fascinating insight into what made Kinsey the women she is now’ ‘Daily Express’. ‘Grafton’s fans will be thrilled with this knockout Kinsey Millhone mystery…
One of the very best entries in a long lived and much loved series’ ‘Publishers Weekly’.

P Is for Peril

Dr. Dowan Purcell had been missing for nine weeks when Kinsey got a call asking her to take on the case. A specialist in geriatric medicine, Purcell was a prominent member of the Santa Theresa medical community, and the police had done a thorough job. Purcell had no known enemies and seemed content with his life. At the time of his disappearance, he was running a nursing care facility where both the staff and the patients loved him. He adored his second wife, Crystal, and doted on their two year old son. It wasn t Crystal who called Kinsey. It was Purcell’s ex wife, Fiona. Everything about their meeting made Kinsey uneasy. Fiona s manner was high handed and her expectations unrealistic. Kinsey s instincts told her to refuse the job, yet she ended up saying, I ll do what I can, but I make no promises. It was a decision she d live to regret. Pursuing the mysterious disappearance of Purcell, Kinsey crashes into a wall of speculation. It seems everyone has a theory. The cops think he went on a bender and is too ashamed to come home. Fiona is sure he ran off to get away from Crystal, and Crystal is just as sure he s dead. The staff at the nursing home is convinced he s been kidnapped, and one of his daughters, having consulted a psychic, is certain that he s trapped in a dark place, though she doesn t know where. Kinsey is awash in explanations and sorely lacking in facts. Then pure chance leads her in another direction, and she soon finds herself in a dangerous shadow land, where duplicity and double dealing are the reality and, with the truth glinting elusively out of reach, she must stake her life on a thin thread of intuition.P Is for Peril: Kinsey Millhone s latest venture into the darker side of the human soul.

Q Is for Quarry

She was a ‘Jane Doe,’ an unidentified white female whose decomposed body was discovered near a quarry off California’s Highway 1. The case fell to the Santa Teresa County Sheriff’s Department, but the detectives had little to go on. The woman was young, her hands were bound with a length of wire, there were multiple stab wounds, and her throat had been slashed. After months of investigation, the murder remained unsolved. That was eighteen years ago. Now the two men who found the body, both nearing the end of long careers in law enforcement, want one last shot at the case. Old and ill, they need someone to help with their legwork and they turn to Kinsey Millhone. They will, they tell her, find closure if they can just identify the victim. Kinsey is intrigued and agrees to the job. But revisiting the past can be a dangerous business, and what begins with the pursuit of Jane Doe’s real identity ends in a high risk hunt for her killer. Q Is for Quarry is based on an unsolved homicide that occurred in 1969, and Grafton’s interest in the case has generated renewed police efforts. During the past year, the body was exhumed and a nationally known forensic artist did the facial reconstruction that appears in the closing pages of Q Is for Quarry. Both Grafton and the dedicated members of the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department are hoping the photograph will trigger memories that may lead to a positive identification. On the day Jane Doe was reburied, many officers were at the gravesite. ‘It’s eerie,’ Grafton writes, ‘to think about the power this woman still has. Here we are, thirty three years later, and she still wants to go home.’

R is for Ricochet

R is for Ricochet is another thrilling installment in Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series.

Reba Lafferty was a daughter of privilege, the only child of an adoring father. Over the years, he quietly settled her many scrapes with the law, but he wasn’t there for her when she was convicted of embezzlement and sent to the California Institute for Women. Now, at thirty two, she is about to be paroled, having served twenty two months of a four year sentence. Nord Lafferty wants to be sure she stays straight, stays at home and away from the drugs, the booze, the gamblers.

It seems a straightforward assignment for Kinsey: babysit Reba until she settles in, make sure she follows all the rules of her parole. Maybe all of a week’s work. Nothing untoward the woman seems remorseful and friendly. And the money is good. But life is never that simple, and Reba is out of prison less than 24 hours when one of her old crowd comes circling around.

Readers have come to expect the unexpected from Sue Grafton, and R is for Ricochet is no exception. In it, a complex and clever money laundering scheme is just a cover for a novel that is all about love: love gone wrong, love betrayed, love denied. And love avenged. For Reba Lafferty, its moral is clear: Sometimes what you hand out in life comes back to bite you in the ass. Sometimes the good guys win, even when they lose.

S is for Silence

This is the nineteenth novel in Sue Grafton’s ever popular ‘Alphabet’ series, featuring PI Kinsey Millhone. Just after Independence Day in July, 1953, Violet Sullivan, a local good time girl living in Serena Station Southern California, drives off in her brand new Chevy and is never seen again. Left behind is her young daughter, Daisy, and Violet’s impetuous husband, Foley, who had been persuaded to buy his errant wife the car only days before…
Now, thirty five years later, Daisy wants closure. Reluctant to open such an old cold case Kinsey Millhone agrees to spend five days investigating, believing at first that Violet simply moved on to pastures new. But, very soon, it becomes clear that a lot of people shared a past with Violet, a past that some are still desperate to keep hidden. And, in a town as close knit as Serena, there aren’t many places to hide when things turn vicious…

T Is For Trespass

tres pass ‘tres p’s n: a transgression of law involving one s obligations to God or to one s neighbor; a violation of moral law; an offense; a sin Webster s New International Dictionary second edition, unabridgedIn what may be her most unsettling novel to date, Sue Grafton s T Is For Trespass is also her most direct confrontation with the forces of evil. Beginning slowly with the day to day life of a private eye, Grafton suddenly shifts from the perspective of Kinsey Millhone to that of Solana Rojas, introducing listeners to a chilling sociopath. Rojas is not her birth name. It is an identity she cunningly stole, an identity that gives her access to private care giving jobs. The true horror of this novel builds with excruciating tension as the listener foresees the awfulness that lies ahead. The wrenching suspense lies in whether Kinsey Millhone will realize what is happening in time to intervene.T Is For Trespass dealing with issues of identity theft, elder abuse, betrayal of trust, and the breakdown in the institutions charged with caring for the weak and the dependent targets an all too real rip in the social fabric. Grafton takes us into far darker territory than she has ever traversed, leaving us with a true sense of the horror embedded in the seeming ordinariness of the world we think we know. The result is terrifying.

U is for Undertow

C alling T is for Trespass ‘taut, terrifying, transfixing and terrific,’ USA Today went on to ask, ‘What does it take to write twenty novels about the same character and manage to create a fresh, genre bending novel every time?’ It’s a question worth pondering. Through twenty excursions into the dark side of the human soul, Sue Grafton has never written the same book twice. And so it is with this, her twenty first. Once again, she breaks genre formulas, giving us a twisting, complex, surprise filled, and totally satisfying thriller.

It’s April, 1988, a month before Kinsey Millhone’s thirty eighth birthday, and she’s alone in her office doing paperwork when a young man arrives unannounced. He has a preppy air about him and looks as if he’d be carded if he tried to buy booze, but Michael Sutton is twenty seven, an unemployed college dropout. Twenty one years earlier, a four year old girl disappeared. A recent reference to her kidnapping has triggered a flood of memories. Sutton now believes he stumbled on her lonely burial when he was six years old. He wants Kinsey’s help in locating the child’s remains and finding the men who killed her. It’s a long shot but he’s willing to pay cash up front, and Kinsey agrees to give him one day. As her investigation unfolds, she discovers Michael Sutton has an uneasy relationship with the truth. In essence, he’s the boy who cried wolf. Is his current story true or simply one more in a long line of fabrications?

Grafton moves the narrative between the eighties and the sixties, changing points of view, building multiple subplots, and creating memorable characters. Gradually, we see how they all connect. But at the beating center of the novel is Kinsey Millhone, sharp tongued, observant, a loner ‘a hero*ine,’ said The New York Times Book Review, ‘with foibles you can laugh at and faults you can forgive.’

V is for Vengeance

A spiderweb of dangerous relationships is at the heart of this daring new novel from the 1 New York Times bestselling author. Kinsey on Kinsey: ‘I know there are people who believe you should forgive and forget. For the record, I’d like to say I’m a big fan of forgiveness as long as I’m given the opportunity to get even first.’ from V is for Vengeance A woman with a murky past who kills herself or was it murder? A dying old man cared for by the son he pummeled mercilessly. A lovely woman whose life is about to splinter into a thousand fragments. A professional shoplifting ring racking up millions in stolen goods. A brutal and unscrupulous gangster. A wandering husband, rich and powerful. A spoiled kid awash in gambling debt thinking he can beat the system. A lonely widower mourning the death of his lover, desperate for answers that may be worse than the pain of his loss. An elegant but ruthless businessman whose dealings are definitely outside the law: the spider at the center of the web. And Kinsey Millhone, whose thirty eighth birthday gift is a punch in the face that leaves her with two black eyes and a busted nose. V: Victim. Violence. Vengeance.

Writing Mysteries

Writing mystery fiction can be a special kind of puzzle. In this new, revised edition of the Mystery Writers of America classic, Sue Grafton weaves the experience of today’s top mystery authors into a comprehensive mystery writing ‘how to.’ Writers will learn how to piece a perfect mystery together and create realistic stories that are taut, immediate and fraught with tension. The book’s contributors include a ‘who’s who’ of the mystery writing elite: Faye and Jonathan Kellerman on conducting accurate research; Michael Connelly on mastering characterization; Tony Hillerman on writing without an outline; Lawrence Block on overcoming writer’s block; Sara Paretsky on creating successful series characters; Tess Gerritson on writing the medical thriller; Ann Rule on the art of writing true crime. And many more!

A Woman’s Eye

Crime is common ground for the twenty one women writers in this extraordinary collection of contemporary mystery fiction. The voices here include professional crime solvers who take you from the mean streets of V.I. Warshawski’s Chicago in a case of music and murder…
to the California freeway where Kinsey Millhone’s beloved VW skids into a shooting…
to the gang held turf of Sharon says mum’s the word. And then there are mothers, grandmothers, battered wives, and social workers ordinary women in extraordinary situations whose voices reveal contemporary life as seen through A Woman’s Eye. From the opening tale of a girl down and out in London and what she steals from a corpse…
to the final story of a summer vacation in the Berkshires, complete with romance and sudden death…
this unique collection brings us great mystery writing that engages both our intellects and our hearts.

The Year’s 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories

The stories by the mystery genre’s best writers, such as Tony Hillerman, Lawrence Block, P. D James, Ruth Rendell and Ray Bradbury, are compiled into an anthology of twenty five of the year’s most suspenseful stories.

2nd Culprit

A crime lover’s collection of short stories includes works by such notable authors as Robert Barnard, Antonia Fraser, Reginald Hill, Peter Lovesey, Sue Grafton, Ellis Peters, and Tony Hillerman. K. PW.

The Crown Crime Companion

The Crown Crime CompanionThe Top 100 Mystery Novels Of All TimeSelected by theMystery Writers Of AmericaAnnotated by 0tto Penzler and Compiled by Mickey FriedmanFor The Crown Crime Companion, the Mystery Writers of America have compiled a list of the best 100 mystery novels of all time, as well as a list of favorites in ten categories. Fully annotated and reviewed by Otto Penzler, this list of the top 100 mysteries will be a valuable resource to fans, introducing them to new novels and reminding them about books by favorite writers they may have missed. Each of the ten category lists is introduced by a master of that category:Classics:Suspense:Hardboiled/Private Eye:Police Procedural:Espionage/Thriller:Criminal:Cozy/Traditional:Historical:Humorous:Legal/Courtroom:H.R.F. KeatingMary Higgins ClarkSue GraftonJoseph WambaughJohn GardnerRichard CondonMargaret MaronPeter LoveseyGregory McdonaldScott Turow

The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ launched the detective story in 1841. The genre began as a highbrow form of entertainment, a puzzle to be solved by a rational sifting of clues. In Britain, the stories became decidedly upper crust: the crime often committed in a world of manor homes and formal gardens, the blood on the Persian carpet usually blue. But from the beginning, American writers worked important changes on Poe’s basic formula, especially in use of language and locale. In The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert bring together thirty three tales that illuminate both the evolution of crime fiction in the United States and America’s unique contribution to this highly popular genre. From elegant ‘locked room’ mysteries, to the hard boiled realism of the ’30s and ’40s, to the great range of styles seen today, this superb collection includes the finest crime writers, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Ed McBain, Sue Grafton, and Hillerman, a best selling crime writer himself. And we sample a wide variety of styles, from tales with a strongly regional flavor, to hard edged pulp fiction, to stories with a feminist perspective. Throughout, the editors provide highly knowledgeable introductions to each piece, written from the perspective of fellow writers and reflecting a life long interest not to say love of this quintessentially American genre. Hillerman and Herbert bring us a gold mine of glorious stories that can be read for sheer pleasure, but that also illuminate how the crime story evolved from the drawing room to the back alley, and how it came to explore every corner of our nation and every facet of our lives.

The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

Bestselling writers such as Mary Higgins Clark, Walter Mosley, Lawrence Block, Jay McInerney, and Donald E. Westlake stand alongside an impressive array of new talent. As guest editor Sue Grafton writes in her Introduction, ‘Nowhere is iniquity, wrongdoing, and reparation more satisfying to behold than in the well crafted yarns spun by the writers represented here’.

A Poison That Leaves No Trace: With Mystery Jigsaw Puzzle

Four new titles based on original short stories written by international best selling authors: Carol Higgins Clark, Nelson DeMille, Sue Grafton, and Julie Smith. Read the short story, assemble the 1,000 piece puzzle, and discover the hidden clues. Then solve the mystery by putting together the pieces in the story and in the puzzle. Slick, book like packaging and high quality artwork make these puzzles a standout. Beware: the 1,000 piece puzzle is different from the cover!

A New Omnibus of Crime

This fantastic new collection picks up where Dorothy L. Sayers’ landmark 1929 anthology The Omnibus of Crime left off, bringing together monumental, important, and entertaining works of short crime fiction published over eight decades from the era of the Great Depression to the first years of the twenty first century.
In lively introductory essays, celebrated crime writer Tony Hillerman and critic Rosemary Herbert place each story in the context of the author’s work and the genre’s literary history. Their extraordinary collection is international in scope and emphasizes the most exciting styles and voices, rather than taking a typical decade by decade approach. As a result A New Omnibus of Crime is packed with page turning, engaging, and spine tingling selections. Stories in this collection include Patricia Highsmith’s ‘Woodrow Wilson’s Necktie,’ Sue Grafton’s ‘A Poison That Leaves No Trace,’ and many more, including never before published works from Jefferey Deaver, Catherine Aird, and Alexander McCall Smith.
A New Omnibus of Crime is a marvelous achievement that brings together some of the greatest crime and mystery short fiction ever collected. Showcasing the work of such revered authors as Dashiell Hammett, P.D James, Ross Macdonald, Sara Paretsky, Ruth Rendell, and Elmore Leonard, it is a definitive volume that will be treasured by all fans of the genre.