(Hey, what about that answering machine, Kinsey?) There is a humorous bent to the book that is peppered throughout its entirety.
She also uses a device of allowing the reader to observe obvious connections in the crime which the characters don’t immediately see. computers, phones, fitting into the book’s late 1980’s setting. Grafton has a good eye for the technology, i.e. And it’s this interaction that leads to some subplot developments which help move the book along. Who’d ever thought you’d need a toilet when you’re on a stakeout? Millhone also has an interesting relationship with her aging next door neighbour/landlord/friend, Henry. So maybe you don’t really want to be a PI? Perhaps the mundane makes for a more realistic character.
Throughout the book you are lead, in minute detail, through a day in the life of a PI, which doesn’t seem all that interesting after all. PI Kinsey Millhone has a sizeable private fortune, which she spends judiciously, and a philosophy that ’the righteous are struck down while the sticky-fingered escape.’ These facts you also learn in the first few pages, along with her vow ‘to see that justice plays out the other way around’. And this Xanakis is connected to a crime. But it seems that Grafton had a hard time coming up with a crime related word that had an ‘x’ at the beginning, so one of the main characters with the surname ‘Xanakis’ appears right on the first page, just so the reader gets the connection. All previous books in the alphabetically inspired titles have included a crime related word-‘ A Is for Alibi’, ‘ B is for Burglar’, ‘ C Is for Corpse’, etc. Sue Grafton has been writing the Kinsey Millhone mystery series, also termed ‘the alphabet series’, since 1982, producing about a novel per year.
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