Just Finished Reading Sue Grafton's J and K Novels

As I continue to make my way through the alphabet, Sue Grafton-style with her series of Kinsey Millhone mystery novels, each title based on a letter, I've just finished reading two more: "J" is for Judgment and "K" is for Killer...having skipped "I" is for Innocent, which I just read this past January.  With each of "J" and "K", I thought I might be reading them for the first time, but as it turned out, both are books I've already gone through.  Here is the link to my January article about "I" is for Innocent...

With "J" is for Judgment, Kinsey is hired to search for Wendell Jaffe, who had disappeared on his boat five years earlier and was assumed to have committed suicide in the face of insurmountable debts.  But did he fake his death instead?  Someone has seen a man who strongly resembles Jaffe in Mexico, and Kinsey goes down there to investigate.  During the course of the story, she also discovers cousins, aunts, uncles, and her own grandmother who all had been living nearby her home city of Santa Teresa, California, but had never felt the necessity before to contact her, an orphan from early childhood after an auto accident had claimed her parents.  Needless to say, Kinsey has very mixed feelings about these people...

"K" is for Killer introduces organized crime, the way you might imagine it practiced in The Godfather. But those criminals are not the problem here...although they may well end up being the solution.  A young woman has recently died in her rented cabin and her mother hires Kinsey to investigate her death.  Grafton introduces a plethora of potential suspects in this classic whodunnit story...

The most remarkable elements of these last two novels I've read of Sue Grafton are their memorable endings...one with Kinsey putting pieces of the mystery together long after everything had already apparently been settled, and the other with her realizing that the criminal justice system is often woefully inadequate when it comes to seeking and catching suspected killers...and maybe she has to skirt the system for real justice to occur, a very touchy matter indeed...