H is for Homicide (Grafton)

H is for Homicide, by Sue Grafton, 1991

I first discovered Sue Grafton's Alphabet series back in the late 90s when I had picked up a few on tape for my daily commute from NYC to Parsippany. (I'd heard about them earlier, probably in a magazine.) I listened to a handful of abridged editions, in a mixed-up order.

A few years back, I decided that I was going to catch up with the series, reading a couple each summer. Sorry, but I'd get bored with any series if I went through 15 or 20 books straight. However, as luck and laziness would have it, I haven't made any blog entries for these books since I started the re-read. Bad timing, I guess. (There is an entry for B is for Burglar from 2009, but that is actually copied from my old paper reading log from many years earlier. That was the first book of the series I'd actually read.)

H is for Homicide brings private investigator Kinsey Milhone into a new role. She finds herself doing undercover work, without any training despite her police background. The book starts with Kinsey returning home early from an investigation and stopping by her office, only to find a co-worker had been killed in the parking lot, his car stolen. Nothing much comes of it over the weeks that follow, but one of the victim's cases for California Fidelity is flagged as questionable. Kinsey does some detective work that gets her caught up in a bigger crime ring than she could have imagined.

It was a fun, quick read and I breezed through it. (This might be because I sort of remember listening to an abridged version of this one, but that would've been -- ack! -- twenty years ago!) There weren't too many soap-opera elements for the continuing characters from book to book, but there was enough to satisfy people who like that kind of thing in series books. None of it gets in the way of this story.

Crazy thing about the story is how dated it is. Published in the early 90s, no one had a cell phone and only one car had a car phone. Finding a telephone (and hiding the house phone) were important to the plot. Even for a throwback like me, that seemed crazy, but that's how life was not that long ago, and shows you how things have changed.

Onto I is for Innocent.

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