Book description
My name is Kinsey Millhone. I'm a private investigator, licensed,
bonded, insured; white, female, age thirty-two, unmarried, and
physically fit. That Monday morning, I was sitting in my office with my
feet up, wondering what life would bring, when a woman walked in and
tossed a photograph on my desk. 'Somebody killed my husband.' Thirty one
years since A is for Alibi was first published, Sue Grafton presents
Kinsey & Me, her first compendium of short stories. It features nine
Kinsey Millhone short stories, each a gem of detection, as well as
autobiographical pieces written in the decade after Grafton's mother
died. Together, they show just how much Kinsey Millhone is a
distillation of her creator's past, even as they reveal a child who,
free of parental discipline, read everything and roamed everywhere. But
the dark side of such freedom was that very parental distance . . . Kit
walked through the empty house, listening to her footsteps resounding
against the pale dead floors . . . the windows stood open to the summer
heat and a wind that smelled of lilacs touched at the screens. From her
bedroom, she could look out into the side yard where the cherry tree had
blossomed every April since time began . . . And now the house was being
sold and the land, their mother was dead, their father remarried: all of
life, everything was breaking apart, breaking down, being levelled,
destroyed, razed, rendered obsolete, that childhood, that life, that
family as odd and unhappy as it had been . . . Published in the UK for
the first time, this dazzling and often moving collection displays the
depth and range of Grafton's writing and reminds us of her unique talent
as a storyteller. Sue Grafton has become one of the most popular
female writers, both in the UK and in the US. Born in Kentucky in 1940,
she began her career as a TV scriptwriter before Kinsey Millhone and the
'alphabet' series took off. She plans to take Kinsey all the way through
the alphabet to Z. Sue lives and writes in Montecito, California and
Louisville, Kentucky.
