Search - S is for Silence (Kinsey Millhone, Bk 19)

I always eagerly await the next Grafton, but I feel like she is getting tired of writing them. This one lacks the excitment of the earlier ones. I hope T is better. This one centers around a little girl whose vivacious (read slutty) mother goes missing. Everyone assumes she has run off with a man. Now the girl is grown and she wants Kinsey to find her mother. Foul play is a given, since it wouldn't be much of a murder mystery otherwise. Disappointing.

Grafton's P.I. Kinsey Millhone has been asked to investigate a cold case involving the disappearance 34 years ago of a "live-wire" young woman, living in a small town with an abusive husband. Her grown-up daughter can't believe her mother would have left her behind, or that in all these years, if she were alive, she wouldn't have contacted her daughter. Kinsey finds that trying to investigate a cold case in a small town, where no one wants to give her a straight answer, is tough. But Kinsey is tough too. A great fast-paced read.

Kinsey Millhone is asked to investigate the 34 year old disappearance of a young woman's mother. It was hard for me to even guess what had happened to her, there were so many possibilities and suspects. Grafton's character continues to be real and exciting.

First Line: When Liza Mellincamp thinks about the last time she ever saw Violet Sullivan, what comes most vividly to mind is the color of Violet's Japanese silk kimono, a shade of blue that Liza later learned was called "cerulean," a word that wasn't even in her vocabulary when she was fourteen years old.

On Saturday, July 4, 1953, most people in Serena Station, California, planned to spend at least part of their evening watching the fireworks display. Violet Sullivan was not one of them. She made arrangements for her usual babysitter, got dressed up, loaded her three-month-old Pomeranian puppy into her purse, and drove off in a cloud of dust in her brand-new Bel Air. She never came back.

Although they did search for her, most people assumed that the vivacious Violet had run off with the latest man who'd caught her fancy. Trouble is, she left a young daughter behind who grew up with a lot of problems due to her mother's disappearance. Reluctantly, Kinsey Millhone agrees to work for Daisy, even though she privately thinks she's not going to get anywhere with the 34-year-old cold case.

Of course we know that once Kinsey starts investigating, she's going to get somewhere. Grafton veers away from Kinsey's usual first person narrative to intersperse flashbacks from the various people in town who knew the missing woman. As the story progresses, the reader begins to understand that all these people have their own reasons for wanting Violet dead.

Hopefully I won't be tarred and feathered by the legions of Millhone fans when I say that previously the only book in the series I'd read was A is for Alibi. For some reason that I can't remember, Kinsey and I didn't really hit it off, but I'm happy to say that I appreciate her a lot more now that I've read S is for Silence. Did I feel as though I was missing a lot of detail, not having read B through R? No. I fell right in step with her as she began digging away at the facts in this case.

The flashbacks populated the town for me and gave me a real sense of the way Violet interacted with everyone. Without those glimpses into 1953, the story would have been skeletal indeed. As it was, I became quite caught up in the book and its characters. I was able to narrow down the field of those who wished Violet ill, but never got around to choosing my chief suspect.

Many times in reading crime fiction, it's not just about whodunit. Sometimes the how and the why are even more important, and once in a while the characters make a reader forget everything else. Where S is for Silence is concerned, the who led to the how and then to the why, and then I just concentrated on a private investigator who doesn't know how to quit... and the daughter, abandoned so long ago, who deserved truth and justice.

I have read many of Kinsey Hillhone's books, but this was a disappointment. It really didn't hold my attention, therefore, a disappointment.

One of her best!