S is for Silence (Grafton)

S is for Silence, by Sue Grafton (2005)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

After R is for Ricochet was a little disappointing, I decided I wanted to read another one before closing out the year. S is for Silence is another cold case for Kinsey Milhone. It's set in 1987 but she is looking into a mystery from the thirty four years earlier (1953).

Violet Sullivan, big on the violet theme with the color of her clothes and the smell of her perfume, left her house on the night of the Fourth of July, 1953, leaving her young daughter home with a babysitter. She was never seen again. Some thought she'd been murdered by her abusive husband, Foley. Others thought she'd fled her abusive husband. Either way, there had been no sign of her, dead or alive, since. Her daughter, Daisy, hires Kinsey's to find some answers. Kinsey is hesitant but agrees to look around for five days and report back, and let her decide if there is any reason to continue. Four slashed tires tell her that she's getting close to something and uncovering things that people want kept buried.

The book is a bit different in that it has dual narratives from 1953 and 1987. It's a little jarring at times. The narratives are not parallel. The flashbacks are usually centered on one person, and take place the weekend Violet disappeared. A couple events are retold from the opposite perspective. Nearly all center around Violet or involve her tangentially.

There are too many characters to get into, particularly since there are people back then who aren't around now. And honestly, since I didn't read straight through, I kind of lost track of who was who or how they were connected to the others either through family or work. Most of the guys are connected to Violet in some way because she chased after and slept with many of them.

Take all flashbacks with a grain of salt because of unreliable narrators. The only point of view we don't get is Violet's, which would be cheating if we knew. And nobody really knew her anyway. The rest of the flashbacks aren't told as flashbacks to Kinsey. They're outside of her story line.

I was surprised that there would be a new cold case so soon after a different one. One could imagine that writing in 2005 about 1987 about a 1953 disappearance that emerging technologies could track down some who tried to disappear and didn't want to be found. It was reasonable that Violet could be either dead or alive.

Cheney gets mentioned, but either he's busy or Kinsey is away. The retired guys Dolan and Oliphant also rate a mention early on. They would love this kind of case, but they aren't available, which is fine. The book didn't need to two of them arguing and babysitting each other. A consult with them might've been nice.

Again, for all the talk of family, there was none about Kinsey's family. It seems as if she dropped that thread, as surely as she reduced the "12 to 15 workings cases" Kinsey has at any one time to answering mail and paying bills. Just an occasional mention of filing a report, answering a call with a little more specificity or something would help.

That said, I enjoyed the book and finished it in just a few days. There will probably be a break before I borrow the next one.

It occurred to me, at this point, all the books are new to me. I stopped listening to books on tape by 2001, and probably sometime before that. It was a commuting thing. I never got past the middle of the alphabet, and they were usually in random order.