X

The Twenty-fourth Alphabet

In 1982, Sue Grafton started her Kinsey Millhone Alphabet series, with A is for Alibi. She has gone through almost every alphabet in the English language, with W is for Wasted coming out in 2013. The latest in the series is X, just X, no ‘is for’ attached. As the bestselling author said in an interview she is entitled to break her own rules.

Kinsey Millhone is one of the most loveable characters in detective fiction, a single (with occasional, very brief romantic entanglements), independent, courageous, witty and totally kickass female, who through A to X has solved crimes and fought felons up and down her stomping ground of Santa Teresa, California. She lives in a studio apartment, owned by the octogenarian Henry Pitts, who is also an expert chef, and her best buddy. His fun family of long-living Pitts is like Kinsey’s surrogate clan, and their watering hole of choice is Rosie’s bar and restaurant owned by a ferocious Hungarian woman, who often feeds them foul-sounding delicacies from her homeland, with Kinsey’s preferred drink of chilled chardonnay.

The series has remained in the 1980s, so no cell phones, computers just about making an appearance, phones are rotary, and notes typed on manual typewriters or handwritten on index cards. The most advanced gizmo of the age is the copier.  Even if this makes the books seem old-fashioned, it also lends them an unhurried charm.

In W, the down-at-heel detective Pete Wolinsky had been killed. In this book, his wife Ruthie, mysteriously threatened with a tax raid, requests Kinsey to check a box of his papers for any useful financial documents. What she find among other things, is a coded papers with six women’s names on it—all connected to a serial offender Ned Lowe-- and a package meant to have been delivered to his daughter April, fifteen years ago. While she is puzzling over this mystery, she has a problem of her own.

She was invited to a swanky mansion by a stylish, rich woman called Hallie Bettancourt, who wants her to track down her son, she gave up for adoption. The son, Christian Satterfield, happens to be a safe cracker and bank robber, just out of prison. Hallie pays Kinsey with marked currency notes that brings the cops down on her trail. Worse, when she goes back to check, the mansion shows no sign of habitation and her client cannot be traced. This gets Kinsey’s hackles up—how dare anybody cheat her?

As her work proceeds, in the backdrop is a severe water shortage turning to drought in California, that gets Henry into water-saving schemes, even if it means digging up his garden. Meanwhile, the new neighbours, an old couple Edna and Joseph, take full advantage of Henry’s kindness and pull their own little cons on him, much to Kinsey’s annoyance.

There are X’s sprinkled all over—a bank of X. Phillips, a wealthy transport baron Ari Xanakis and his divorced wife Teddy, the cause of a lot of Kinsey’s problems, a Father Xavier, and so on.

The culprit on whose trail Kinsey sets out, is just a small part of the book, but has left his vicious mark on several women. Even the usually equanimous Kinsey spooked out when she finds that he has trespassed into her office and left it off kilter. 

Although there is murder, burglary, cheating and corruption in Sue Grafton books, the times are still relatively peaceful and most people inherently decent. The world is protected from terrorism, computer hacking and religious fundamentalism. Fans wonder what will happen to Kinsey Millhone when Grafton completes the ‘Z’ book. There are still a quite a few months to go, but the suspense is killing.

X

By Sue Grafton

Publisher: PanMacmillan

Pages: 416