"U" is for Undertow

October 12, 2009
False memory syndrome provides the core of bestseller Grafton's intriguing 21st crime novel featuring wry PI Kinsey Millhone (after T Is for Trespass
). In 1988, Kinsey takes on client Michael Sutton, who claims to have recovered a childhood memory of men burying a suspicious bundle shortly after the unsolved disappearance of four-year-old Mary Claire Fitzhugh in 1972. But Sutton has a track record of unreliability, and Kinsey must untangle and reconfigure his disjointed recountings to learn if they are truth or fiction. Chapters told from the point of view of other characters in other time periods add texture, allowing the reader to assemble pieces of the case as Kinsey works on other aspects. A subplot involves Kinsey wrestling with conflicting information about her estranged family. Though whodunit purists may be a bit disappointed that the culprit is revealed well before book's end, both loyal Kinsey fans and those new to the canon will find much to like. Author tour.

October 15, 2009
A wild tale by an untrustworthy witness sets Kinsey Millhone (T Is for Trespass, 2007, etc.) on the track of a stone-cold case.

An article on famous kidnappings has jogged Michael Sutton to recall something that happened on his sixth birthday in July 1967. Playing at a friend's house in Horton Ravine, he tells Kinsey nearly 21 years later, Sutton saw two men burying something he's now convinced was the body of Mary Claire Fitzhugh, a kidnapped 12-year-old who was never restored to her parents, even though they paid the paltry ransom demand. Sutton doesn't remember the exact location of the house or even the name of the friend, but Kinsey agrees to take a day's pay to check out his story. Even within a day, she gets results, and soon the Santa Teresa canine unit is sniffing around an unmarked grave. Unfortunately, the buried remains aren't those of Mary Claire Fitzhugh. Worse, mounting evidence indicates that there's good reason to doubt Sutton's memory. As Kinsey struggles with the case, distracted by the latest overtures from the family that abandoned her long ago, the puzzle is obligingly, if gradually, resolved by a long series of interspersed flashbacks to the summer of 1967, when four families—Patrick and Deborah Unruh, their rebellious son and his common-law wife; veterinarian Walter McNally and his son Walker; professor Lionel Corso and his son Jon; and Kip and Annabelle Sutton, the parents Kinsey's client once accused of molesting him—were launched on a collision course.

Short on mystery, but rewardingly sensitive in teasing out the shock waves that reached from the Summer of Love to the heart of Santa Teresa.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 15, 2009
With each book, Grafton is only getting better. Her Kinsey Millhone series is now in its 21st installment but is nowhere near past its prime. A young man named Michael Sutton shows up at Kinsey's office one afternoon, claiming to have suddenly recalled details from his childhood concerning an unsolved kidnapping of a little girl 20 years ago. Kinsey is skeptical but agrees to work for one day on the cold case. And so it begins. Weaving the narrative and point of view between events and characters in the 1980s and the 1960s, it is not until the breathless final pages that everything connects. VERDICT Readers will not abandon Kinsey Millhone as the series winds down (only five left, VWXYZ!). Her latest is fresh, complex, fast-paced, and immensely enjoyable. Kinsey's sharp 1980s research skills might even leave a few readers nostalgic for a pre-Google world. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 8/09.]Andrea Y. Griffith, Loma Linda Univ. Libs., CA

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2009
With 20 previous Kinsey Millhone mysteries to her credit, Grafton might well be tiring of her character, even if readers arent. But that doesnt seem to be case; Kinsey continues to grow more interesting and complex as years pass in real and in fictional time. Set in the 1980s, when old-fashioned footwork, telephones, and typewriters still ruled the lives of PIs, this entry picks up the character as she investigates a kidnapping and presumed death of a child, brought to her attention by a young man two decades after the fact. Although Michael Sutton is an unreliable narrator, and the only fact thats provable now is the childs disappearance, Kinseys stubborn curiosity keeps her on the case. Then Michael turns up dead, and some weird coincidences begin to make sense. Grafton uses her characters childhood memories (including Kinseys own) to lead the reader smoothly across the years, at the same time exploring how long-held feelings of resentment, self-hatred, and fear add up to murder, both in the past and the present. Worth the wait for Grafton fans; Margaret Maron devotees will like this one, too.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)