Just Finished Reading Sue Grafton's "W" is for Wasted

Mystery novelist Sue Grafton is winding down her current Kinsey Millhone series with the titles based on letters from the alphabet and just the "Y" and "Z" books left to be published.  As for myself, I've almost caught up with her writing, having just finished reading "W" is for Wasted.  It may well be the longest book in this series so far...still, it is relatively short compared to some of the other books I've been plowing through of late...

It's still 1988 and Kinsey Millhone, a single (twice divorced) late-thirties private detective based in the mythical California coastal city of Santa Teresa (about where Santa Barbara would be) finds out about the recent deaths of two men: one is a shady private eye whose path she has crossed in earlier cases and the other is a completely unknown homeless man who left on his person a piece of paper with her name and office address and number on it.  After being notified of this connection, she then is shocked to find that she had been appointed by him to be the executor of his estate...consisting of more than half a million dollars...to be distributed among those named in his will: Kinsey and Kinsey alone! This is enough to draw her into an increasingly complex mystery, one that somehow involves trial runs of medications, designed to treat alcoholism, given to homeless human guinea pigs. Grafton highlights the lives and plight of the homeless in this book, as well as making the point that there is as much diversity among them regarding their motivations, histories, and mental states as among the general population...

Kinsey also discovers a distant family relationship between herself and the deceased homeless man, which introduces her to her father's side of the family, something that had been hidden from her since she was left orphaned when both of her parents died in a car accident while she was still a young girl.  Also, a new character, Ed the Cat, gets his introduction late in the series (better late than never)...and eventually plays an important role in the story's outcome.  I thought "W" is for Wasted was one of Sue Grafton's better books, although once again I felt that she should have presented the narrative completely from Kinsey's perspective instead of jumping around to other characters as she has been doing for the last few books...