50 Book Challenge: book 27
B is for Burglar by Sue Grafton
This is a case of coming back to deal with unfinished business. Despite professing a deep love of the crime novel I have, somehow, never got around to reading this series by Sue Grafton. Despite the fact it’s got an engaging, no-nonsense female heroine who I should empathise with and enjoy reading about. At the point of writing, it appears, we are at the hardback release of S is for Silence so I’ve got a fair bit of catching up to do if I’m ever going to come to terms with these books.
[Buy from Amazon
However, why ever the hell not start at A? Why, indeed? Haven’t you heard of serendipity? More to the point, have you not heard of the vagaries of public libraries? They only had B in, OK? So it was a case of starting there or putting it off for even longer. Live with it, already. (Although I am just about to reserve A is for Alibi and will probably try to read them in order from this point on.)
One of my big problems with these novels is that I think I’ve dipped into the sequence (I’m not even sure that I haven’t read A is for Alibi already – that stuff about the dumpster was very familiar) and another an embarrassing tendency on my part not to be able to mentally distinguish Kinsey Millhone, the heroine of these books, from VI Warshawski, the female PI created by Sara Paretsky. Obviously setting all this straight is long overdue.
So, what of the actual book? Well, I really enjoyed it, and if this is an indicator of what’s to come then I should have a good time with this series. It sparked a debate in our household over whether a novel featuring a PI can be described as a ‘police procedural’ and the consensus was no. Even though the heroine is a former police officer herself she has access to few of the support networks, forensics, for example, that go to make up such a big part of the roman policier. While she can get information from contacts in the California police department this can only ever happen at second hand, and therefore can’t really be a defining feature of the novel. In which case, this must be a quasi-police-procedural, or a PI-procedural, or something similar. The first half, in particular, describes the painstaking process of following leads, working contacts, tracking down evidence and even billing clients. We even see something of Kinsey’s ‘day job’ – she has a symbiotic relationship with an insurance company called California Fidelity that often needs claims investigated.
The second half rapidly picks up pace as the case spirals out of control and Kinsey’s sent off in a radically different direction to the one she was expecting. There’s a lot more action and a big, risky climax following a sleight of hand over the identity of the villain which was thoroughly satisfying. The book also had a nice, consistent internal world with lots of references to the events of the last novel and hooks for future storylines. All in all a rapid, satisfying read and one that I’ve got 17 opportunities (and counting) to reprise…
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