Karen U. (editorgrrl) reviewed on 1/15/2005 + 255 more book reviews

From Booklist
Kinsey Millhone, she of the \"slightly dinged\" \'74 VW Bug, the portable Smith Corona, and the peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwiches, is back, and she\'s landed in a mystery that\'s as good as two, moving from the laconic private-eye story at which Grafton excels to a bated-breath thriller. Millhone, short on cash, is ambivalent about taking on a missing-persons case involving a rich doctor who may have repeated history by running out on his new wife and infant son. The case becomes riveting to Millhone, however, when she learns that the good doctor is sought after by federal fraud busters on suspicion of medicare fraud. With this story chugging along on procedure, matters take a sick plunge when Millhone discovers that the brothers who are her new landlords (one of whom she\'s become romantically involved with) murdered their parents 10 years previously. Her effort to escape that relationship is overridden by her need, financial and psychological, to investigate what happened to the family jewels, at the urging of an insurance company. As always, Grafton gives us a truly complex heroine, marvelous depictions of Southern California architecture and interiors, and a writing style that can make a weed path interesting (for example, snails are seen as moving on the sidewalk \"with the optimism of the innocent\").

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