Mystery & Suspense
Named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2009, Sue Grafton matches, indeed exceeds, expectations with her twenty-first alphabet novel, U is for Undertow
In April 1988, a callow twenty-seven-year-old named Michael Sutton appears out of the blue at Kinsey's office, asking her to investigate his eyewitness account of two men burying a bundle in a wooded area—twenty-one years earlier. As it happens, that was precisely the same time that a four-year-old girl vanished from a wealthy enclave in Kinsey's hometown of Santa Teresa, California. Sutton claims that he has repressed this memory for two decades. While her instinct says he's telling the truth, she doesn't know how she will be able to prove it. Kinsey likes nothing better than picking at a tough problem, but this one is a doozy.
With a touch of ingenuity, she manages to find the spot. Acting on her say-so, the police—among them Kinsey's onetime boyfriend Cheney Phillips—dig up the alleged burial site and make a discovery that suggests that Michael Sutton has seriously misjudged the situation. Kinsey's only lead takes her back to the 1960s, and this triggers recollections of her own humiliating high school years and her bittersweet upbringing by an unmarried aunt. When the trail to the kidnappers comes to a dead end, she persists, and despite her best efforts to protect the innocent, there will be two more violent deaths—and a final confrontation with the killers.
Read an excerpt from U is for Undertow:
Wednesday afternoon, April 6, 1988
What fascinates me about life is that now and then the past rises up and declares itself. Afterward, the sequence of events seems inevitable, but only because cause and effect have been aligned in advance. It's like a pattern of dominoes arranged upright on a tabletop. With the flick of your finger, the first tile topples into the second, which in turn tips into the third, setting in motion a tumbling that goes on and on, each tile knocking over its neighbor until all of them fall down. Sometimes the impetus is pure chance, though I discount the notion of accidents. Fate stitches together elements that seem unrelated on the surface. It's only when the truth emerges you see how the bones are joined and everything connects.
Here's the odd part. In my ten years as a private eye, this was the first case I ever managed to resolve without crossing paths with the bad guys. Except at the end, of course.
My name is Kinsey Millhone. I'm a private detective, female, age thirty-seven, with my thirty-eighth birthday coming up in a month. Having been married and divorced twice, I'm now happily single and expect to remain so for life. I have no children thus far and I don't anticipate bearing any. Not only are my eggs getting old, but my biological clock wound down a long time ago. I suppose there's always room for one of life's little surprises, but that's not the way to bet.
I work solo out of a rented bungalow in Santa Teresa, California, a town of roughly 85,000 souls who generate sufficient crime to occupy the Santa Teresa Police Department, the County Sheriff's Department, the California Highway Patrol, and the twenty-five or so local private investigators like me. Movies and television shows would have you believe a PI's job is dangerous, but nothing could be farther from the truth… except, of course, on the rare occasions when someone tries to kill me. Then I'm ever so happy my health insurance premiums are paid up. Threat of death aside, the job is largely research, requiring intuition, tenacity, and ingenuity. Most of my clients reach me by referral and their business ranges from background checks to process serving, with countless other matters in between. My office is off the beaten path and I seldom have a client appear unannounced, so when I heard a tapping at the door to my outer office, I got up and peered around the corner to see who it was.
Through the glass I saw a young man pointing at the knob. I'd apparently turned the dead bolt to the locked position when I'd come back from lunch. I let him in, saying, "Sorry about that. I must have locked up after myself without being aware of it."
"You're Ms. Millhone?"
"Yes."
"Michael Sutton," he said, extending his hand. "Do you have time to talk?"
We shook hands. "Sure. Can I offer you a cup of coffee?"
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