In 1990, I had my first child. Germany was reunified. The Dow Jones was at 2800. Mikhail Gorbachev was the President of Russia. The Hubble Telescope was launched. Sue Grafton published the seventh book in her series built around California Private Detective Kinsey Milhone, G is for Gumshoe.
To say that things were different then is putting it mildly. This was a time when very few people had portable phones, and they were the size of a suitcase. The only thing you could use them for was phone calls. Not very many people had personal computers unless you were a programmer (like me). Imagine being a private investigator when you didn’t have information at your fingertips, and researching meant actually going somewhere and looking through paper. Finding people was often a matter of luck. If they didn’t answer their work or home numbers, there was no way to know where they were or to contact them.
In this world, Kinsey moves back into her apartment after it was blown up earlier in the series. She’s now hired to search for Agnes Grey, a reclusive woman whose daughter hasn’t heard from her or been able to locate her. At the same time, she’s also got a price on her head. As capable as Kinsey is, she can’t have eyes everywhere at once and teams up with Robert Deitz, whom she hires as a bodyguard.
Tracking down the missing woman takes her to a vagrant community in the Mojave Desert. There are all sorts of subsistence housing there, and finding where the woman once lived is no easy feat. Even once she does, the place seems as if it hasn’t had a regular occupant for quite some time. Although she just wants to find the woman, Kinsey’s curiosity gets the better of her, and she begins digging into why the woman was living like that in the first place.
While reading this, I had an idea what was going to happen. Kinsey knows her life is in danger, so she hires a bodyguard. Yet she spends a lot of time trying to figure out how to ditch him. Hello? Why bother hiring him in the first place? That was my biggest issue with the book, dated references notwithstanding. However, there’s something there between her and Dietz, as much as she’s trying to deny it. This causes her to reflect on the relationship she’s been having with a married police detective. It’s not one of her better character traits, as she has justified this to herself while at the same time trying to gain sympathy for being treated as “the other woman.” It doesn’t work, and I’m hopeful her love life will finally take a different direction.
The mystery surrounding Agnes Grey is the most interesting part of the book. Her daughter seems to be leading a normal, respectable life while her mother lives like a vagrant in the desert. Agnes is elderly and suffering from dementia to some degree when she’s found. Something has terrified her to force her to live as she does, yet trying to break through the fog of her dementia and find out what’s going on is nearly impossible. Kinsey worries about bringing the woman back to St. Theresa, where her daughter lives, and where Agnes says she will die if she goes there. But why? That’s the mystery, and I liked that Kinsey didn’t just drop the case once she’d found her.
The audiobook is narrated by Mary Peiffer who has narrated all of the audiobooks in this series so far. She does a good job with it, getting the right emphasis and emotions as she’s acting out the characters. I’ve had issues with the way she voices Kinsey at times. It feels like she needs to give her a mannish, deep voice in order for Kinsey to be seen as strong and independent. I don’t think Kinsey would be a wilting violet, but at the same time she can be feminine and strong.
This is a solid entry in the series. Readers have to be ready to accept the difference in society and roll with it. It’s fun for those of us who remember that world. The story was good and the mystery was interesting. Kinsey knows better and still makes poor choices at times, which is something that goes against the strong woman she’s supposed to be.
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Categories: Book Reviews
Computers were expensive in 1990; I wasn’t a programmer, but I owned an Apple IIe with an Imagewriter II dot-matrix printer and a color monitor, courtesy of my dad’s brother Sixto, in 1987. (Mikhail Gorbachev was the President of the Soviet Union, as well as the General Secretary of the Communist Party; the President of the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic was Boris Yeltsin.)
I got an Apple IIC in the mid-80s and had it until I switched over to PCs. I was just telling Marc I used to subscribe to a magazine that every month had different programs in it you could type in and create yourself.
Wow. That’s cool. That was a compact version of the Apple II (hence the “c” in the model name). The first computer I used (other than the Editwriter 500 in the newspaper production room in college) was a Macintosh. I wanted one of those, but it was $3,500 plus tax, so I settled for the Apple IIe.
I recently had a conversation with another reader about how much we enjoy those “before all this” books. Mystery/thriller/detective stories were – as you say – very different in that nothing was instant; legwork meant actually walking (or letting your fingers do the walking); things were more personal. I’ve started to seek out books from the ’80s and before to appreciate the slower pace and more intellectual approach to pretty much everything in the society of the day.
It’s true. I like seeing actual legwork rather than just relying on a computer for everything. Connelly’s Bosch books are the same way, and even when he does get more technology he still does the legwork.