Y is for Yesterday

July 10, 2017
Bestseller Grafton’s gripping 25th novel featuring Santa Teresa, Calif., PI Kinsey Millhone (after 2015’s X) opens with a theft. In January 1979, misfit Iris Lehmann steals a test to help her best friend, Poppy Earl, a fellow student at an elite private high school in Santa Teresa. Iris’s impulsive act sets off a cheating scandal focused on Poppy and her boyfriend, Troy Rademaker. This leads to 15-year-old Fritz McCabe fatally shooting Sloan Stevens, who supposedly ratted on the two cheaters. In 1989, as required by law, the California Youth Authority releases Fritz, who’s free to carry on with his life—but now someone is demanding $25,000 from his parents to suppress a videotape showing Fritz and Troy sexually abusing a drunken Iris back in 1979. Fritz’s mother hires Kinsey to investigate the amateurish blackmail scheme, which puts her on the trail of a host of suspects and secrets in Santa Teresa’s wealthiest enclaves. Meanwhile, Kinsey’s nemesis from the previous book, mass murderer Ned Lowe, is still on the loose and has a score to settle with her. Grafton once again proves herself a superb storyteller. Author tour. Agent: Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Literary.

Despite approaching the end of the alphabet, Sue Grafton's novels continue to entertain. Ably narrated by Judy Kaye, this intricate story features P.I. Kinsey Millhone's efforts to uncover the person who saved a tape of a brutal sexual assault at an elite private school and waited a decade until one of the perpetrators was released from prison to demand a ransom from his parents. As Millhone tries to determine who has the tape, she finds herself the target of the scheming former students as well as a psychopath with a murderous grudge against her. Kaye's steady, measured performance and her depiction of Millhone are particularly effective. The audiobook lapses into moments of tedium, however, when Grafton and Kaye seem distracted. But Kaye especially shines when she shares the satisfying conclusion to the investigation. D.J.S. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

October 2, 2017
In Grafton’s penultimate Kinsey Millhone alphabet mystery, actor Kaye provides the perfect tough but feminine, self-effacing voice for the series’ protagonist. 1989 is drawing to a close when Kinsey, working as a private eye, agrees to help her new clients, Lauren and Hollis McCabe deal with an extortionist. Their son, Fritz, has just completed a 10-year stint in a county youth prison for murdering a female classmate. The extortionist is demanding $25,000 to keep an old sex video, starring Fritz and an underage girl, from sending him back behind bars. The novel alternates between 1979, when Fritz and his despicable, entitled private school friends drift from a cheating scandal to the brutal killing, and Kinsey’s search for the extortionist among Fritz’s former peers, whom age has not improved. Kaye effortlessly takes listeners through Kinsey’s sleuthing, repeating her voices for regulars, like octogenarian landlord Henry Pitts and the crazed Ned Lowe, and smoothly creating vocal characterizations for newcomers. Self-absorption is the key to her interpretations of the awful class of 1979. The well-born boys sound properly loutish, the overprivileged girls, emotional and surly. Only a skillful actress could make them sound so unappealingly entitled. A Putnam/Wood hardcover.