Kinsey Millhone Series by Sue Grafton 4.0

I started to read this series purely by accident... I had seen the books with the large letters on them before but didn't read them. So, while I was in Hastings I decided to start reading K is for Killer and it was great! Little did I know the story would make more sense if you actually read the books in alphabet order. Therefore, after reading K I went back and started at A is for Alibi and so on. I believe that Mrs. Grafton is now working on the letter W. This series has 22 books thus far, each contains between 350-400 pages.

Through each of the books you follow a private investigator named Kinsey Millhone. With a strong will and tough exterior Kinsey solves her crimes with the help of some witty characters.

 

The following is a synopses' are from Barnes and Noble. 

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. The trail twists 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 Burglar

"Beverly Danziger looked like an expensive, carefully wrapped package from a good but conservative shop. 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. 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.

A house destroyed by arson. A brutally murdered a woman. A missing lynx coat. 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 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."

This is a good easy to read series. I shall return for another review after I have a few more under my belt! *Don't worry I'll add the synopses for K when I get to it in alphabetical order :)