Kinsey Millhone is a single female working as a private investigator in Santa Theresa, California. She is hired by Nikki Fife, the convicted murdered of Lawrence Fife (her husband), to find out who really killed him. Her investigation leads her into a series of other murders that seem to be connected.

I don't know if I can even justify one star on this book. I was at no point able to "connect" with Kinsey. I love a strong female character, but she does not fit that bill. She is crass which makes her seem uneducated and low-class. Attempts at presenting emotion from her were not believable; she simply came across as apathetic the entire novel. And how she could solve any crime with the amount of alcohol she consumed in this book is beyond me. Aside from the lack of dimension in her character, I am also not a fan of Grafton's writing style. This is the first book I've read of hers and from the get go, I was not impressed. At first I thought maybe I would try reading a couple of her books before I made a decision, but I don't think I could make it through another book of this caliber. The book was completely predictable. The outcome was obvious before you even hit the midpoint. Grafton tends to include pointless detail that does nothing to further the plot. And there are so many problems with the logic throughout the novel. For example, she says that Kinsey wipes down her Las Vegas hotel room to get rid of prints. Yet she paid her bill, SIGNED the bill and both owners of the hotel saw and talked to her. If she's trying to get rid of her presence in the hotel, she left an awfully bright trail...afterall, if someone were trying to establish she was there, wouldn't fingerprinting be further down the road from eyewitness accounts and paper records?

This was definitely a let-down, and I will not be pursuing any further letters of the alphabet. There are far more interesting books out there to fill my time.