Pun Salad

The book is set in Spring 1988, and Ms Grafton's PI heroine, Kinsey Millhone, still has her hot Mustang. A troubled young man appears on her doorstep: Michael Sutton has been to the cops, and they have referred him to Kinsey. He tells a vague yarn about the summer of 1967, when he wandered off into the woods and came across two men burying something, acting mysterious. And now, by coincidence, he's realized this was around the same time a four-year-old girl was kidnapped. Could the men have been burying… the child?

Sutton's story is too farfetched and flimsy for the police to investigate, but he manages to scrape together enough cash to hire Kinsey for one day. Her masterful detective work gets him more than his money's worth. Unfortunately (for Sutton), Kinsey's doggedness causes her to pursue the investigation unpaid; while she eventually discovers the truth, Sutton's fate is not so pleasant.

As she did in the past few books, Ms. Grafton intersperses Kinsey's first-person narrative with third-person sections set both in 1966-67 and the "present" 1988. And (once again) these work pretty well. There's a huge conflict between the bourgeois values of upper-middle-class Santa Teresa and the nascent hippie movement. Grafton is remarkably unsympathetic to the hippies.

A side plot involves Kinsey's relationship with her mostly-estranged family. A secret about Aunt Gin, who brought Kinsey up after her parents were killed, is revealed. And the ending is kind of sweet.