Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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G is for Garbled

Y is for Yesterday (Kinsey Milhone #25) by Sue Grafton

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In 1979, four boys from an elite private school in the fictional town of Santa Teresa film their sexual assault on a classmate. Not long after, the tape goes missing and the person reported to have stolen it turns up dead. Some of the boys are sentenced to prison time. Ten years later, in 1989, one of the boys, Fritz McCabe, is released from prison. He receives letters threatening to release the tape and send him back to prison, unless he and his parents pay […]

Maybe You Shouldn’t Start a Series With the Penultimate Novel

X by Sue Grafton

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Despite enjoying plenty of grocery store detective novels in my younger years (James Patterson, Michael Connolly, etc.) I had somehow never read anything by Sue Grafton. I knew of her, of course, and her alphabet-themed series of detective novels, but for whatever reason had never picked one up. Well, for the 2024 PopSugar reading challenge, I had to read a book starting with the letter X. I had started reading a different book, and was struggling with maintaining interest, and decided to switch it up. […]

Shoulder pads and shootouts

G is for Gumshoe (1990) by Sue Grafton

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CBR Bingo Square: Relation”ship” (Fiercely independent PI Kinsey Millhone has to allow fiercely protective PI Robert Dietz be her bodyguard) I read a bunch of the ‘Alphabet Mystery’ series in my teens, when there was somehow time to read everything, and I would stock up on library books rather than booze for staying up all night on New Year’s Eve. They star, and are usually narrated by, Private Investigator Kinsey Millhone, a young-ish woman in California. She and Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski (1982-2022) were probably […]

Spirit of Christmas Past

O is for Outlaw by Sue Grafton

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This book was a great look into Kinsey’s past. We have heard offhand via the books that Kinsey was married twice. Her first marriage was to an ex-cop Mickey Macgruder and we know that Kinsey and he parted on bad terms. This book gives us even more information than what we were given before. Mickey was accused of murder and Kinsey bounced. She never talked to Mickey again after the divorce, but you start to see some glimmers in the man which probably is what […]

Kinsey Moves Settings to Slightly Average Results

N is for Noose by Sue Grafton

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Not a bad look at Kinsey, just not that interesting I have to say. When Kinsey tends to leave Santa Teresa the story-line often suffers. This one just fell flat to me. I think that is because it’s a lot of Kinsey not putting a lot of stuff together and the ending leaving things up in the air about what happens to someone. I don’t like unresolved story-lines, and this one wasn’t resolved to me. “N is for Noose” has Kinsey agreeing to go and […]

A Kinsey Installment Looking at Family

M is for Malice by Sue Grafton

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I ended up finishing this book last night and found the overall story to work quite well, while also providing us more details into Kinsey’s maternal family as well as her relationship with Dietz. I was surprised by the ending though since I honestly couldn’t figure out who the murderer was, and when we understand what happened and why I felt pity for the character of Guy Malek. Grafton is often able to write a victim of a murder in such a way that you […]



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