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V is for Vengeance (Kinsey Millhone #22)
by Sue Grafton
by Sue Grafton
For the private detective Kinsey Millhone’s latest outing, Sue Grafton offers a character-driven crime novel (à la Ruth Rendell), with a bit of the rich mafioso family interaction of The Sopranos thrown in. Not for the first time in Grafton’s oeuvre, not all chapters are from Kinsey’s point of view, so some chapters offer a "from the inside" view of other characters. For the most part, it works!
In Santa Teresa, it’s still 1986 and Kinsey, turning 38, falls into a crime caper when she spots a woman shoplifting at Nordstrom’s. Kinsey recounts her efforts to crack a large-scale shoplifting ring and to survive problems with bad crooks, a nosy and annoying reporter, one very bad cop, and neighborhood restaurateur Rosie’s frightful Hungarian cuisine. However, the real central character is the Lorenzo Dante, Jr. The head of a loansharking and wholesale shoplifting enterprise, Dante, as he is known (to distinguish himself from Lorenzo, Sr., his one-time rumrunner dad), is actually a sensitive and refined man who yearns to get away from all this—which may soon be necessary since the authorities have been gradually accumulating the evidence needed to take him down. Dante is looking for a lady to join him should he have to go on a very long excursion.
For now, Dante must deal with his possibly double dealing and also ignorant and cruel brother, Cappi, who has come out of prison looking, with dad’s encouragement, to assume a key role in the family business. Kinsey, for her part, is driven to help and protect Pinky Ford, the small time crook who gave Kinsey perhaps her most precious possession—her lock picks. (Kinsey, the quintessential orphan who has had bad relationship experiences as an adult, can only summon up a real attachment to her saintly near nonagenarian next-door neighbor Henry and to Pinky!) Some of the good characters are a little too good and some of the bad characters are a little too bad and some characters are well realized by Rendell’s standards and others less so, but overall, V is for Vengeance is an entertaining and satisfying story.
In Santa Teresa, it’s still 1986 and Kinsey, turning 38, falls into a crime caper when she spots a woman shoplifting at Nordstrom’s. Kinsey recounts her efforts to crack a large-scale shoplifting ring and to survive problems with bad crooks, a nosy and annoying reporter, one very bad cop, and neighborhood restaurateur Rosie’s frightful Hungarian cuisine. However, the real central character is the Lorenzo Dante, Jr. The head of a loansharking and wholesale shoplifting enterprise, Dante, as he is known (to distinguish himself from Lorenzo, Sr., his one-time rumrunner dad), is actually a sensitive and refined man who yearns to get away from all this—which may soon be necessary since the authorities have been gradually accumulating the evidence needed to take him down. Dante is looking for a lady to join him should he have to go on a very long excursion.
For now, Dante must deal with his possibly double dealing and also ignorant and cruel brother, Cappi, who has come out of prison looking, with dad’s encouragement, to assume a key role in the family business. Kinsey, for her part, is driven to help and protect Pinky Ford, the small time crook who gave Kinsey perhaps her most precious possession—her lock picks. (Kinsey, the quintessential orphan who has had bad relationship experiences as an adult, can only summon up a real attachment to her saintly near nonagenarian next-door neighbor Henry and to Pinky!) Some of the good characters are a little too good and some of the bad characters are a little too bad and some characters are well realized by Rendell’s standards and others less so, but overall, V is for Vengeance is an entertaining and satisfying story.
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