Pun Salad

I am also playing catchup with Sue Grafton's alphabetically-ordered series about the intrepid private investigator Kinsey Millhone. She's up to T, and (as you see) I'm only on O.

During a lull in her paid investigative work, a blast from the past confronts Kinsey: a storage unit rented by her ex-husband has gone into default, and the contents snapped up by a "scavenger" looking to make money off its contents. The scavenger tracks down Kinsey, and sells her one of the stored items: a box of her memorabilia. But one of the items therein is something Kinsey's never seen before: a letter from a barmaid revealing unknown facts about her ex-husband and the incident 14 years previous that had caused their divorce.

It's a pretty good yarn, although, via Ms. Grafton's word processor, Kinsey (as always) tends to tell us way too much about the mundane details of her day: her exercise regimen, her diet, driving routes, all irrelevant to plot or characterization. By now, I've learned to put up with this, like accepting a few bad habits of a loved one. (Although I can't seem to stop complaining about it. Here's an old Usenet rec.arts.mystery thread where I called Sue Grafton the "Queen of Pointless Description")