My Weekly Book

C is for Corpse – Sue Grafton

The third volume in this author’s series of Kinsey Millhone mysteries and I am glad to say that I noticed a distinct deviation from the formula established in the first two before it had time to get tired. Since the salient stuff is set out in the first few sentences of the book I have no compunction whatsoever about quoting them here:

“I met Bobby Callahan on Monday of that week. By Thursday, he was dead. He was convinced someone was trying to kill him and it turned out to be true, but none of us figured it out in time to save him. I’ve never worked for a dead man before and I hope I won’t have to do it again. This report is for him, for whatever it’s worth.”

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So, a nice little premise to be going on with. Of course, we spend half the novel waiting for Bobby Callahan to die and I was caught by surprise when it actually happened, which I count as an authorial achievement. Other things thrown into the mix are a moneyed social milieu that leaves Kinsey distinctly uncomfortable, the unexpected and unwelcome rearing up of an old romance and a new woman in the life of Henry Pitts, the 81-year-old landlord that our heroine carries a flaming torch for, despite the 50-year age difference between them. Heady stuff, all juggled expertly by the author, as I had come to expect after just two previous instalments of this series.

Unusually for Sue Grafton I did successfully spot her murderer this time round. Usually she lays so many false trails and red herrings that she gets past me. But I don’t mind, because there is a nice, warm, compensatory glow in being right. It was just the way that one particular name kept coming up again and again… Look away now if you don’t want details of the ending… I was impressed by the way that Kinsey managed to get herself out of the lethal situation set up for the last few pages without any need for a deus ex machina-style intervention. I was sitting on the Tube thinking: “I just can’t see who is going to come riding to the rescue,” and then no-one did, which I liked. This had a flavour of the locked-room mystery about it – a group of people from a tight social set and you just knew it had to be one of them. All in all a fun, easy, satisfying read that had me almost looking forward to the daily commute. These books always have laughter and intelligence mixed in with the action and it’s a winning formula for me. Off to the library to reserve D is for Deadbeat…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 1:07 PM and is filed under 2006 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.