Pun Salad

Another outing for the intrepid private eye Kinsey Millhone, this one being number … um…

% perl -e 'print ord('P') - ord('A') + 1, "\n";'
16

In this one, Kinsey is hired to find a missing doctor, by the missing doctor's ex-wife. In a subplot, Kinsey also needs to find some new, affordable office space, as her current arrangement is becoming increasingly untenable. Both efforts immediately get complicated, as (a) Kinsey gets involved in the innermost workings of the family and work associates of the missing doc; (b) she finds an ideal office, but her prospective landlords are a pair of brothers with a shady past, and (worse) one develops kind of a romantic obsession with Kinsey. Nevertheless, she does some real detecting here; and, yes, at one point she's in actual peril.

I found this installment in the series to be a significant improvement over the ones immediately preceding. As always, Kinsey is a sharp-eyed observer of her environment and others, and she's not so hot at self-reflection. (Although the books are written with Kinsey first-person narrating, Ms. Grafton somehow wangles to reveal more about Kinsey than Kinsey knows herself. Good trick.)

As an extra current-events bonus, Medicare fraud is involved.

I should also note that Ms. Grafton seems to cut back here on the semi-annoying habit of including piles of irrelevant details, for which I previously awarded her the title "The Queen of Pointless Description".