Just Finished Reading Sue Grafton's D, E, and F Novels

Mystery writer Sue Grafton, as I have written on this blog a number of times, is in the process of traveling through the alphabet with a novel based on each letter.  The detective is always Kinsey Millhone and the stories are written in the first person from her point of view.  She is based in the mythical California coastal city of Santa Teresa (supposedly patterned after Santa Barbara), and from there deals with the often eccentric and disturbed people who seem attracted to her as clients and suspects.  I began reading this series many years ago, hopping around in no particular order, and now can't figure out which books I've read so far.  So I started anew from "A"...and have just quickly gone through "D" is for Deadbeat, "E" is for Evidence, and "F" is for Fugitive.  Each of these last three, in some ways, seems familiar to me, and I may have read the last two through to the end before.  But I know that with "D" is for Deadbeat, the ending was a surprise...

With "D" is for Deadbeat, Kinsey is hired by a man who wants her to personally deliver a $25,000 cashier's check to another party...but his check for her detective fee bounces and he disappears from the scene, leaving her to try to find both him and the party he is trying to reach with the money. This story is about the terrible mistakes people can make in their lives, their attempts to make amends with the victims, and how those victims can struggle with the conflicting ideas of forgiveness and vengeance.

"E" is for Evidence is how an engineering firm, run by one of five contentious siblings, gets struck by a fire and files a claim with the insurance company working with Kinsey.  When she investigates the incident, she finds herself framed for insurance fraud along with the company's head.  Evidence has been tampered with, and Kinsey races against time to discover, largely by determining the inner dynamics of the relationships between those five siblings, who is behind the frame-up.

In "F" is for Fugitive, an aging and ailing father hires Kinsey to exonerate and free his son, who has recently been recaptured after being a fugitive prison escapee for seventeen years after being convicted for a murder for which he claims innocence.  Kinsey goes to a sleepy coastal town with her investigation and seems to uncover one murder suspect after another with every turn.

In each of these books, there are murders to solve, and the killer, presented as a character early in the story, is invariably a surprise at the end.  Knowing this, it then becomes easier to sift out which characters the author is inserting as red herrings and which ones may well be revealed as the villains at the end.

The next book, "G" is for Gumshoe, is one that I definitely remember reading...but I'm still going to read it again anyway.  I like Grafton's writing and like to keep up with her protagonist Kinsey as her personal life gradually changes from "letter to letter"...