Just Finished Reading Y is for Yesterday by Sue Grafton

It had been a while since I read one of Sue Grafton's "alphabet mystery" books featuring spunky and independent California private eye Kinsey Millhone...once I caught up with the author's series I found myself having to wait until the next book came out.  Sadly, Sue Grafton passed away just eleven days ago after fighting cancer for two years...this will be the final book in the series: no "Z". I enjoyed Y is for Yesterday...although I've found myself enjoying her novels when the focus is entirely on Kinsey instead of those that have several flashbacks interspersed throughout the narrative. This particular story keeps hopping back and forth between my favorite detective's investigation in 1989 and the crucial events that transpired ten years earlier...

In 1979 in the city of San Teresa there are a bunch of spoiled rotten high school brats attending a private school.  One of the students, Austin,  is a manipulate bully who blackmails his "friends" into obediently following him.  One classmate who stands up to him is Sloan, a girl who Austin falsely accuses of snitching on a couple of students for cheating on a standardized test.  Sloan is shunned by everyone until she gets hold of a damaging sex video that Austin and others made, consequently demanding that Austin "call off" the shunning.  She ends up murdered...the boy who shot her is now (in 1989) just released from imprisonment and finds himself and his parents being blackmailed by someone who threatens to send that tape to the police.  Not wanting their son to go back to jail, the parents hire Kinsey to discover the identity of the blackmailer, eventually involving herself with mysteries surrounding the events of 1979.  There are other subplots taking place in Kinsey's life, most notably an escaped serial killer who is trying to kill her...

Remember the feared bully Scut Farkas and his toady sidekick Grover Dill from the movie A Christmas Story?  In that tale, the "bad guys" are socially isolated with the rest of the kids basically shunning them.  But with Y is for Yesterday, Sue Grafton much more accurately depicts what usually happens with bullies: they poison the social environment around them, with those who won't kowtow made into scapegoats and shunned: I know, I experienced this in high school at my bus stop and expect that those bullies who have survived to this date are probably just as degenerate and manipulative as they were back then...sad.

I recommend Y is for Yesterday, but if you haven't read anything by Sue Grafton you probably would be better off beginning with the first book A is for Alibi.  That's because although the main mystery in each book is usually independent of the others in the series, Kinsey's personal life progressively develops as the reader "goes through the alphabet"...