Just Finished Reading Sue Grafton's "R" and "S" Mystery Novels

I've been a big fan of mystery writer Sue Grafton, whose claim to fame is her "alphabet mystery" series featuring California private investigator Kinsey Millhone and the titles of which have been published in alphabetical order, with just a couple of "letters" to go until completion.  I'm also going through it in alphabetical order, sometimes running across a book I've already read...but most of them are new reads.  This was the case with my latest: "R" is for Ricochet and "S" is for Silence, published in 2004 and 2005, respectively.  This is significant because Grafton has compressed Kinsey's ongoing sleuthing adventures to the point where the stories themselves are set in the late 1980s...and this can be important when dealing with such things in the stories as telephone access and computers...

Although I've enjoyed reading these books, I have to weigh in on the negative side about these last two.  In "R" is for Ricochet, the character of Kinsey Millhone is made passive and secondary by another character, a young woman named Reba who is the individual our private eye has been hired by Reba's father to guide through her initial stages of parole after imprisonment for embezzlement.  Reba seems to assume all of the spunky and intelligent aspects of Kinsey that I have come to admire...leaving the detective to spend most of the story "tagging along" or dealing with her 87-year old landlord's romantic situation or that of her own...quite separate from the main story line and presenting an annoying distraction for me, the reader.  As for "S" is for Silence, much of the story is presented as a 34-year flashback to a young woman's unsolved disappearance...no Kinsey in sight anywhere.  When she does occasionally make her presence known and finally figures out the case, her method and reasoning for finding the main culprit in the story is unexplained.  I was so frustrated by the ending to this book that I went on the Internet to read others' reactions...and found that many of them agreed with me...

If these last two books of Sue Grafton that I just read happened to be the first ones for me as well, I might have decided to abandon reading any more of her books.  As it is, however, I know that she is much more capable of producing a good result...after all, I've now gone all the way through book #19.  I'm looking forward to a better story with the next Millhone novel, which I discovered is titled "T" is for Trespass...