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Heroine's Q rating carries 'Quarry'

Sunday, September 29, 2002

By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor

Seventeen down, nine more to go. Sue Grafton pushes doggedly ahead with her self-appointed mission to get through the alphabet one mystery book at a time with this long-awaited installment in the sleuthing life of Kinsey Millhone.

	"Q is for Quarry" By Sue Grafton Putnam, ($26.95)

She began flagging several letters ago, burdened not only by the arbitrary nature of her project, but also by the dull character of her private eye. Kinsey is nearing 37 as her latest adventure looms -- single, alone, no children, no hobbies, no quirks, no vices, no pet peeves and really, no personal style.

In high school, Millhone "fumbled my way through ... without achieving academic excellence. I was never elected to class office, never played a sport and never participated in extracurricular activities. ... Mostly I walked around feeling glum and disenfranchised."

Orphaned as a young child and raised by an aunt who blocked contact with other family members, a reluctant Millhone has gradually come to know her long-lost relatives, who actually live quite close to her in central coastal California.

Perhaps seeing that she needed to flesh out Millhone's background, Grafton has been using the rekindling of family ties as plot device lately. Here, she manages to combine Millhone's family history with a murder investigation.

Stacey and Dolan are two retired and ailing cops who want to reopen an 18-year-old unsolved slaying. The body of a stabbed teen girl was found in 1969, but her corpse was never identified. It's now 1987, and the idle officers apparently need something to occupy themselves.

(Grafton sets her novels in the 1980s, a good way to eliminate the now-omnipresent cell phone but to no other significant effect.)

They call in Kinsey, whose detecting business appears to be negligible, and she is shocked to learn that the body was found on property owned by her late grandparents just an hour away from her home.

Her relatives owned a mere 23,000 acres of prime vineyard land, but Kinsey never knew it until Grafton got to "Q." Hard to believe.

As we've read in many a "police procedural" novel, basic cop work is boring, consisting mostly of interviews and paperwork. Grafton, though, must find it fascinating because she devotes pages to interrogation, the menus of lunches and dinners eaten en route to those interviews, as well as the various California highway route numbers used to get there. Many of the details are based on an actual California case. Grafton includes an epilogue detailing her interest.

There's not a lot of suspense here, just more legwork than a Rockettes rehearsal. Kinsey does inch a bit closer to her family, collecting some valuable details and family photos along the way.

Students of Kinsey Millhone's biography will find more details to flesh out her scrawny skeleton, but fans of tightly plotted suspense and strong characters should look beyond the Ps and Qs.