My Weekly Book

2007 Reading Challenge: Book 61

At last I’m coming to the end of my stockpile of Grafton’s alphabet novels - and clearing the decks for L which I just got out of the library and must return at some point soon.

I know people tend to have strong and often polarised views about this series. A review I read from a recent reader pointed out that this was both darker and less clear-cut than many of the Kinsey Millhone novels, and I would say that this is spot-on. Certainly I had to spend quite a while afterwards trying to get clear in my head what had taken place. But there again, isn’t real life like that? Things so rarely tie off into the neat and regular knot you hoped for.

Our eponymous heroine is approached, seemingly on the spur of the moment, in her office late one night by a woman on her way home from a support group for the parents of murdered children. She’s never been given a satisfactory answer about what happened to her daughter, and she’s hoping that Kinsey can provide one. She’s dragged into the situation becoming as much a participant as an observer, one of the weavers of a very tangled web, definitely more involved than she should be and this helps lead to a shocking conclusion.

These novels are always absorbing, escapist, hard to put down and often readable in less than 48 hours - a real immersive experience, especially if you read two or three together and that’s one of the qualities I really like. It might not be great literature - but that’s scheduled for later in the month ;- )) I thought that it was refreshing to see the author taking her character to new heights in this book and am glad that this very long series still seems to be powering along nicely. The conclusion is one, like A is for Alibi, the book in which Kinsey first shot someone dead, that has profound effects for the future of the series and I look forward to reading on and finding out whether it does. Apparently there’s quite a change of tone for L, and I can’t help think that’s such a bad thing but also that she certainly shouldn’t get off scot free.

Onward… I’ve had an exhausting week so maybe I’ll put the heavy-going history book and the Jane Austen novel I’ve been trying to read to one side and have a crack at L instead. Now that does sound fun…

Sue Grafton’s website: K is for Killer

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 7:32 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.