Filled in Gaps on My Reading List by Rereading Patterson and Grafton Novels

While I was compiling my reading list for the past few years, I came across a couple of obvious gaps with long-running series by authors James Patterson and Sue Grafton.  The first, Patterson's Women's Murder Club series that he co-authored with other writers, progressively goes up the number scale with its titles, while the late Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone mystery series did the same with the letters of the alphabet: I was missing the "4th" and "B" books respectively although I knew I had already read them, so I just finished rereading both and here are my reactions...

In 4th of July, written by Patterson and Maxine Paetro, San Francisco police investigator Lindsay Boxer finds herself confronted with two different series of brutal killings...upon discovering the perpetrators of the first, she and her partner Jacobi are gunned down when they carelessly shoulder their guns while assisting two teenager suspects out of the car they were in on a high-speed pursuit and crash.  Both good guys recover, but Lindsay finds herself on the end of a massive lawsuit from the father of the girl whom Lindsay had to shoot dead in self-defense...this subplot continues throughout the story as she discovers that a earlier cold case seems to be repeating itself in other grisly homicides involving apparently harmless, affluent suburban couples in the area. The story culminates in the resolution of both the lawsuit and that murder case. And I don't know why I never got around to writing a review of it earlier...

The same feeling came to me after rereading Sue Grafton's "B' is for Burglar...no earlier mention of it in my blog archives, but I definitely did read it back then.  Kinsey Millhone is a twice-divorced 32 year old private detective, formerly a cop in Santa Teresa, California where she still lives and works.  An affluent woman commissions her to find her missing sister Elaine in order to obtain a signature releasing inheritance money from a recently deceased relative...seems pretty routine, but Kinsey soon discovers her object has disappeared off the planet, leading her to visit a second home in Boca Raton, Florida while the apartment next to Elaine's back in California, where a burglary-turned-murder had occurred just a few months before, keeps increasing in significance.  With this reading I was brought back to Kinsey's fictional home town with her 80+ year old landlord/baker/crossword puzzle creator Henry Pitts, her assorted routines including her morning three-mile jogs on the beach, Rosie's nearby restaurant where the owner cooks up wild, scary Hungarian dishes, and a budding off-and-on romance with Jonah Robb, a local cop.  Naturally, I had read this book before so the ending wasn't a surprise when I went through it again...but it was fun reading anyway.  Now excuse me while I go back on my blog to last month's cumulative reading list and fill in a couple of gaps: Lindsay and Kinsey in California....