Type of bind: Hardcover
EAN num: 9780333417782
Format: Import
ISBN number: 033341778X
Label: MACMILLAN
Manufacturer: MACMILLAN
Page Count: 192
Printing Date: 1986
Publishing house: MACMILLAN
Studio: MACMILLAN
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Rated by buyers 
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I love these books, but this one time I was sent a remedial book which left alot to desired.
Rated by buyers 
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So Sue Grafton is pretty much the modern-day mistress of mysteries. She invents a wildly wonderful leading character who is wittily observant and cynical of the various mysteries that flock her. The writing is simple, to-the-point, yet totally in tune with the world. It's a fun, sexy, mystery led by a delightfully unconventional heroine.
Rated by buyers 
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Qute a few reviewers rated this starter of the alphabet series with 3 or less stars! Well, I think it was a fantastic beginning to her amazing series. The ONLY offerings in the series which are 'average'
(3 Stars) are "H" is for Homicide and "M" is for Malice, but I love her
still.
Rated by buyers -
It's been a while since I read Grafton's alphabet series from the beginning, and a few things immediately came back to me:
1) I still love Kinsey. Yeah, she's rude, yeah, she's a little too fond of her vino, but nobody's perfect. That's what makes her a great character.
2) This book does a very good job of demonstrating just how detailed and boring real PI work is. It's not like in the movies, where a major clue/revelation unfolds at the very first stakeout or interview. There are a lot of seemingly disparate bits of information that have to be drawn out of uncooperative people and eventually put together--somehow. This book covers that very well.
3) The early Milhone books show their age, especially this one. I'm not talking about the technological antiques littered through the book, like lack of cell phones or even the virtual absence of answering machines (they weren't common in 1982). It's in the style and pace of the writing. Grafton had a great deal of freedom to tell her story in a more deliberate, painstaking, detailed way. You don't see writing like this very often anymore.
Things like violence, language and gratuitous sex don't bother me in a PI mystery. Grafton obviously wasn't shooting for soft-boiled or cozy here, so making Kinsey virginal and polite, and the narrative squeaky clean and civil would have made the series more like a Nancy Drew turns 30 piece. Sorry, but Nancy Drew stops being great by the time most people are 12. If you're a grown up, you're allowed to read (and write) grown up stories. I think Grafton was deliberately trying to get a Chandleresque book with the twist of a female Marlowe. Female PIs were just about unheard of when Grafton wrote this book (I think Marcia Muller was the only person using the device before Grafton).
Anyway, after Chandler and Hammett, Ross MacDonald and Mickey Spillane, I also thought it was sort of normal for a PI to get tangled up romantically/sexually with a suspect (even THE suspect!). It's sort of a given in the genre, but the masters know how to make it work. Grafton wasn't quite at that level in this book, but Chandler, Hammet, et all, weren't masters with their very first efforts, either. If you're gonna do hard-boiled California P.I., ya gotta get some S=E=X in the mix. Surprisingly, this was one of the more believable parts of the book, at least for me. I could well understand Kinsey's attraction to Charlie--I'd gone out with about a dozen non-murderous copies of him back in my own single days. So just because that aspect doesn't ring true to some people...believe me, it can ring very true to others.
In conclusion, the book isn't the greatest ever written, or the best Grafton's ever done, but it's a good introduction to the series. The author created an intriguing character I wanted to read more about, and I definitely wanted to see how Kinsey went about solving other mysteries. Thankfully, Grafton got the chance to do it. The series gets progressively better with each book after this, in every respect, with the plots and Kinsey getting stronger in direct proportion to Grafton's confidence in her writing and storytelling.
Rated by buyers -
As the very first in the series of Alphabet Mysteries, Sue Grafton just begins to "flesh-out" the Kinsey Millhone character. I really liked this book and although the antagonist was predictable, I enjoyed getting to know the characters involved in this novel, as many of these characters will be seen again in the later books in this series. This book sets a groundwork for the later novels and gives some basic insight into Millhone's motivations which are expounded in later novels. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this as I have all of Sue Grafton's works. This would have gotton 5 stars if the outcome hadn't been so predictable.
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