Review of U Is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

From San Francisco Bay Guardian --

Trash Lit: Grafton's craft in 'U is for Undertow' --

By: Tim Redmond --
03.04.10 --

U is for Undertow
Sue Grafton
Putnam. 403 pages, $27.95

I love the Sue Grafton books. I bought A is for Alibi in 1983, when it came out, and I’ve read every one of them since. Unlike, say, Patricia Cornwell, whose characters age (and get crabbier) as time passes, Kinsey Milhone is eternal, always young, always living in a town called Santa Teresa that’s a lot like Santa Barbara, always living with her old (but never dying) landlord, Henry, always eating at the foul Hungarian restaurant down the street. Milhone is a comfortable protagonist, never deeply tortured, but never exactly adjusted either, and even her OCD habits (locking her car – and telling us she locked her car – about 50 times a book) are endearing.



This one’s set in 1988, where Milhone is quite at home, and in 1963-1967, where Sue Grafton is less so. Grafton’s got a problem with hippie chicks – one of the central villains in U is for Undertow is a girl named Shelly who later changes her name to Destiny. She’s an almost embarrassing parody of how middle America saw flower children in the late 1960s – except that she appears in 1963, before there were a lot of real hippies about in the land. To make matters worse, she brags that she was part of the beat scene in San Francisco and slept with both Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg – which is fairly unlikely, even in fiction; I don’t know who Allen Ginsberg, a proudly gay poet, was fucking in 1963, but I don’t think there were many hippie chicks on the list.

The horror of the dirty girl is almost too much to believe! Destiny is living in a bus with the son of a respectable family who dropped out of college to join her – and she has a child by another man who’s left the picture! And she’s raising her child (gasp) a vegan! And he runs around naked! And she’s preggers again, this time with his kid, and she insists on natural childbirth! She is, of course, also a total beyotch, who doesn’t respect the mother of the once-nice-young-boy loser who is under her hippie-chick spell.

There’s other stuff I didn’t love in here – one young character, who hates his stepmom, gets in trouble at his fancy private school and is forced to transfer to the horrors of a public school, where he of course meets awful bad kids who corrupt him entirely and turn him into a druggie.

In and around all this, though, is a fascinating mystery. It involves two kidnappings from the '60s, a guy who might or might not have fabricated repressed memories, a dead dog in a dead girls’ grave, and a tangled tale across three decades that weaves the lives of the good and the bad (and it’s deliciously hard to tell which is which) into a first-rate detective story.

We also along the way learn some new clues about Milhone’s past (great trivia about Aunt Gin for serious fans of the series) and get a couple of excellent Grafton comments about the important things in life:

“At the time, I’d introduced [cancer patient] Stacey to junk food, which he’d never eaten in his life. Thereafter, I tagged along with him as he went from McDonald’s to Wendy’s to Arby’s to Jack in the Box. My crowning achievement was introducing him to the In-N-Out Burger. His appetite increased, he regained some of the weight he’d lost during the cancer treatments, and his enthusiasm for life returned. Doctors were still scratching their heads.”

Hippie-chick sex. Hippie chick seduction of a high school kid. Sweet Kinsey-shoots-murderer scene. (“It’s only in the movies the bad guys keep firing. In real life, they sit down and behave.”) I almost gagged on the '60s stuff, but I stayed up way past my bedtime to get to the end.

Review of U Is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

From London Free Press --

By Joan Barfoot --

By: Ron Wynn, rwynn@nashvillecitypaper.com --
29th January 2010 --

Just five more novels and Sue Grafton can retire the alphabet.

Starting with A Is For Alibi, Grafton has book by book worked her way through the ABCs of crime fiction, in cahoots with her protagonist, Kinsey Millhone. Occasionally a novel has faltered, but generally Grafton (and Millhone) have held themselves to high and satisfying standards.

And they do so reasonably well again in U Is For Undertow, a smartly complicated mystery - several mysteries, really - held together as usual by the often-dishevelled, contrary-minded and stubborn Millhone.

Despite the many years of her career in print, Kinsey never has to age much - she's 38 in U Is For Undertow, a novel set mainly in 1988, with back-references to events that occurred 21 years earlier.

So there's no bother with grey hair and creaky limbs, or with tools like cellphones, text messaging or DNA analysis - just the traditional foot-soldiering private investigator grind of asking a whole lot of questions and not giving up.

This time the case begins when a young man named Michael Sutton arrives at Kinsey's office with a strange story of seeing two men burying something in a back yard around the time of his sixth birthday, 21 years back.

He's now convinced that what he saw was the burial of a little girl who'd been kidnapped and presumed dead. A cop, intrigued by the tale but unwilling to reopen the investigation on the basis of Michael's vague childhood memory, has sent him to Kinsey.

Besides the difficulties of looking into such a long-ago crime, Kinsey learns that Michael has his own credibility problems, having wrecked his relationships with his family over false abuse allegations instigated by a therapist.

Still, when she tracks down the site of the alleged burial, police agree to dig it up - to find only the bones of a dog, complete with collar and tags.

That would end matters for most people, but Kinsey tracks down the dog's owner and its long-retired vet. She also learns that the dead child was not the only one kidnapped around the same time - another was restored to her adoptive parents when they paid a ransom.

Grafton's tale spins around families - men who were once unhappy boys, aging parents with unsatisfactory offspring, Michael Sutton's hostile siblings, and not least, her own recently discovered relatives who keep trying to bind her to them.

It's an interesting quirk - or comment - that a couple of the more stable former children, Kinsey included, were responsible in many ways for raising themselves, absent proper parents.

Grafton is given to plumping out pages with excess detail, and by the last 80 to 100 pages, the killers' identities aren't exactly hard to discern. But her characters are vivid and real, and their troubles and sorrows engaging.

Plus, more violent death and menace ramp up the suspense to the end.

Grafton has probably wondered a few times over the years what she was thinking when she set out to work her way through the alphabet, book after book, but even with five more letters to go, it's safe to say she and Kinsey Millhone have together created an honorable body of work.

Joan Barfoot is a novelist living in London.

Book World reviews Sue Grafton's 'U Is for Undertow'

From The Washington Post --

Book World reviews Sue Grafton's 'U Is for Undertow'Book World reviews Sue Grafton's 'U Is for Undertow' --

By Gerald Bartell --
January 11, 2010 --

U IS FOR UNDERTOW
By Sue Grafton
Marian Wood/Putnam. 403 pp. $27.95

Sue Grafton's "U Is for Undertow" arrives with a double layer of suspense. There are the absorbing details of PI Kinsey Millhone's latest case, and for fans there is the question of whether this latest installment, just five letters from Case Z, lives up to its often great predecessors in the author's alphabet series of mysteries.

Fans, relax. Grafton has delivered another winner. In this one "the past rises up and declares itself," as Kinsey observes, embarking on an investigation that uncovers powerful secrets long concealed. Not since Laura Lippman's "What the Dead Know" and Nancy Pickard's "The Virgin of Small Plains" has the rattling of skeletons been so harrowing.

On an April afternoon in 1988 (a month before Kinsey's 38th birthday), Michael Sutton, good-looking and still preppy in his mid-20s, asks Kinsey to investigate a scene he stumbled upon in 1967, when he was 6. At the time, a 4-year-old named Mary Claire Fitzhugh had just been kidnapped. Playing near a friend's house, Michael spotted two men digging a trench. Nearby lay a blanket-wrapped bundle. Now, 21 years later, a news update on the unsolved kidnapping has stirred his memory, and he insists to Kinsey that the bundle held Mary Claire's body.

Michael's conviction is gossamer, perhaps rooted in the memories of an overly imaginative child. But he can't let it go. He worries about his own safety. The men who were digging had asked for his name, and he gave it. And he wants to help Mary Claire's mother find closure, a need that hooks Kinsey on the case. Looking at a photo of the 4-year-old smiling brightly, wearing a ruffled dress and holding a stuffed bunny, Kinsey remarks, "the story made something in my chest squeeze down."

But soon she finds reasons to question Michael's veracity. He was fired from a job selling radio ads when someone discovered he'd lied on his job application about having a degree from Stanford. Worse, his sister, a reporter, tells Kinsey that Michael, nudged on by a self-aggrandizing psychologist, accused his mother, father and brother of abusing him sexually as a child. He later recanted the charges, but his parents were devastated.

If Grafton had stayed with just the kidnapping, the two diggers and Michael's story, she would have given us an entirely satisfying puzzle to solve, something like the trim installments she began producing with "A Is for Alibi." But "U Is for Undertow" runs to 403 pages, and there's no padding. In no hurry to cut to the chase, Grafton devotes the core of her book to tracing and probing her characters' motives, as Kinsey makes the familiar but disturbing discovery that a need to survive can drive innocent people to do evil.

A misguided attempt by city engineers to create a safe harbor in Kinsey's home town, Santa Teresa, illustrates this theme. Kinsey observes that, however well intentioned the project may have been, it created riptides that swept people to their deaths. "As with so much in life," she says, "good intentions often generate unexpected results." Working with this theme, Grafton periodically interrupts Kinsey's brisk narration to tell the absorbing stories of several characters living in Santa Teresa during the '60s. She describes their lives in keen, observant detail, often with a twist that makes something in the reader's own chest "squeeze down." Here, fat, prepubescent Jon Corso tries to eat a cold grilled-cheese sandwich after his mother has died: "Because of his braces, he couldn't bite down on a sandwich without getting bread sludge stuck in the wires, so he broke off bites one at a time, thinking of her."

These stories from the past inevitably link to one another and then, finally, to the kidnapping. With each connection, Grafton affords the reader the palpable satisfaction of a safecracker listening to tumblers fall into place. Indeed, the intertwining narratives pull at a reader so strongly that they nearly turn the case of Michael Sutton into a McGuffin. But not entirely. Grafton comes up with clues to savor and puzzle over -- marked bills, the tags on a dead wolf dog and, in a subplot, some old family letters. In a touching epilogue that ends "U Is for Undertow," the missives send Kinsey on her own journey into the past to learn that for her, at least, the tides of her early days were more placid than she remembered.

Review: Jack Batten on U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

From Toronto Star --

Review: Jack Batten on U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton --

By Jack Batten Books Reporter --
Jan 10 2010 --

The ever-gracious Grafton maintains her craft, from A through U

I interviewed Sue Grafton when she was only up to "I".

The interview took place in 1992 – on the afternoon of April 22 to be specific – when Grafton came through Toronto promoting I is for Innocent, which was at the time the latest in her series of crime novels featuring the California private eye Kinsey Millhone. As her legions of fans are aware, Grafton's books have titles that march their way through the alphabet, and my interview on the subject of the "I" novel was for a CBC-TV Sunday afternoon arts show (now long defunct) under the guidance of a savvy arts producer (now long retired).

To tape the interview, the producer organized an informal studio with a cameraman, a sound guy and their equipment, in a suite at the Sutton Place Hotel. To add to the relaxed atmosphere, the microphone was tucked out of sight in a potted plant standing beside Grafton and me.

Just as I was launched into the first of my carefully scripted questions, one about the spiffy new tweed jacket that the usually non-chic Millhone wears in I is for Innocent, an electric saw began noisily buzzing in the room overhead.

The producer waved the interview to a halt and phoned down to the hotel desk about the intrusive saw. Soon the saw shut down, and the producer instructed me to again ask the question about the spiffy blazer. Half way through the question, the phone in the sitting room rang. The exasperated producer raised her arm in another stop signal and answered the phone. It was the desk downstairs telling us what we already knew, that the saw had ceased its buzzing.

The interview continued on its misbegotten way for another half hour, and throughout the shambles, Grafton remained more than agreeable. She was game, funny and answered questions she'd no doubt heard a thousand times as if they were fresh to her that day.

When the afternoon finally wound to an end, she picked up my copy of her book and wrote in it, "For Jack ... who addresses potted plants ... `could you just go back to the question about the blazer?' ... Thanks much. I had a ball. Take care. Sue Grafton."

If all of this gives you the idea that I'm predisposed to look favourably on anything Grafton writes, that would be an accurate impression. But her new book also deserves praise on the basis of merit. U is for Undertow happens to be as brisk, engaging and inventive as anything in Grafton's novels from "A" to "T".

Like all the books in the series, the new one takes place in the 1980s – April 1988 in this case – and like many of the previous books, the plot finds its beginnings in tragic and murky events several years earlier. Back in the 1960s in Kinsey Millhone's hometown of Santa Teresa (a stand-in for the real Santa Barbara), a 3-year-old girl was kidnapped; though the kidnappers were left the demanded ransom, they never picked up the money, nor was the child ever seen again. Now, in 1988, a client with fresh information about the crime hires Kinsey to reinvestigate the very cold case.

This becomes an intricate business, introducing a dozen or more disparate characters to the tangle of criminal involvements. One of Grafton's strengths lies in her skill at keeping the story on the move no matter how many good guys, bad guys and in-between guys stick their noses into the plot. In lesser narrative hands, the range of characters, the time frames and the subplots might overwhelm the book's purpose, but Grafton keeps the people of U is for Undertow coming through clearly, their motivations consistent and their actions fathomable.

For Kinsey, the dogged private eye, the sleuthing is complicated by action in her personal life, something that has gathered impact in recent books. Kinsey, 37 in 1988, has a flinty side. "I'm bitter by nature," she says in the new book. Kinsey may be a little too hard on herself, but as an orphan raised by a maiden aunt who came up short in lavishing anything like affection on the little kid, she has reason to take a jaundiced view of life.

A few novels back, Kinsey discovered relatives she never dreamed she had. They live further north in California, and they're growing increasingly insistent on making connection with the long lost or misplaced Kinsey. She's of two minds about the idea. Having been burned by two divorces, Kinsey prefers the solitary life.

Grafton stretches the tantalizing personal angle in ways that add texture to Kinsey's character. It makes her more than just another private eye on a case, and we can probably assume that she won't work out the family dilemma until the series reaches "Z."

In the meantime, reading the latest novel, a Kinsey fan can justifiably say, in Grafton's own phrase from April 22, 1992, "I had a ball."

Sue Grafton's 'U Is for Undertow' is her best

From Erie Times-News --

Sue Grafton's 'U Is for Undertow' is her best --

By MARY FOSTER --
December 27. 2009 --

Can it really be 27 years since Kinsey Millhone sifted through clues in "A Is for Alibi?"

Yes, it is, and as the end of the series looms, Sue Grafton has never been better.

Millhone, who is still solving crimes in the 1980s and just about to turn 38, has changed little since that first novel. She's still living alone and slightly in love with her landlord, Henry.

By the time of her latest novel, "U Is for Undertow" (Marian Wood/Putnam, $27.95), though, the plot is more complicated than usual, and much darker.

A mysterious man tells Millhone that a recent newspaper article about a 20-year-old kidnapping has unleashed a flood of memories for him.

It was his sixth birthday, Michael Sutton tells Millhone, when a 4-year-old-girl was kidnapped. In his recently restored memories, Sutton remembers being in the woods behind his house that day, and he thinks he knows where the child was buried.

Millhone is skeptical, but reluctantly agrees to devote a day to the case.

In "U," Grafton switches voices and points of view, leading the reader through distant events and current happenings.

"Here's the odd part. In my 10 years as a private eye, this was the first case I ever managed to resolve without crossing paths with bad guys," Millhone writes. "Except at the end, of course."

The action switches between the 1980s, and Millhone's investigation, and the 1960s. In this earlier period, we meet Deborah Unruh, an upper middle class homemaker whose son Greg has dropped out of college and taken up with Shelley, an unpleasant young woman, and her 6-year-old son.

The trio has been panhandling or outright stealing to make ends meet. But now Shelley is pregnant, and they crash at the Unruhs in an old bus they park behind the house.

"What fascinates me about life is that now and then the past rises up and declares itself," Millhone writes by way of introducing her latest case.

As all fans know, Millhone is a loner, raised by a cantankerous aunt after her parents were killed in a car crash. Her feelings for family have been bitter and distant. Her mother was disowned for marrying her father, and Millhone knows few of her relatives.

That's another situation Millhone needs to clear up, and in "U Is for Undertow," she does.

Do I Have to Read Sue Grafton?

From The Daily Beast! --

Do I Have to Read Sue Grafton? --

by William Boot --
12/21/2009 --

Book: U is for Undertow
Author: Sue Grafton
Pages: 403
Readable Pages: All of them

Sample line: “How could I have known then that within days, he’d be laid out on a coroner’s slab with a bullet hole between the eyes?”

This isn’t your typical book-review column. I’m reading the bestsellers: the Grishams, the Cornwells, the Higgins Clarks. Moreover, I’ll render the kind of blunt verdict you get when reading about toasters in Consumer Reports. I’ll tell you which of the bestsellers, if any, are readable. If they’re semi-readable, I’ll tell you which pages to skip. With any luck, you’ll know which one to pack for the flight to Jakarta. If you want a different approach, try The New York Review of Books.

Our first book is Sue Grafton’s U is for Undertow, a fat, royal blue book that sits at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The year is 1988. The hero is one Kinsey Millhone, who sounds less like a private eye than a natural-gas concern. The flap jacket says this is Grafton’s 21st alphabetically enhanced mystery (A is for Alibi, etc.), and Kinsey feels like she’s been around the block. She’s 37 and twice-divorced; she’s incapable of using an eyebrow pencil without giving herself “the fierce demeanor of a Kabuki.” Kinsey’s got some long-festering family drama, and if you want to cut straight to the whodunnit you should skip over pages 25-26, 226-233, and 253-260.

But that’s not recommended, because U is for Undertow isn’t much of a mystery. Sure, there’s a baby who was kidnapped and murdered 20 years ago, and a 6-year-old boy, now grown, who may or may not have seen its burial. But what’s wonderful about the book is the sharp-eyed details Grafton packs into its frame. For example, watch Kinsey arrive at a cat hospital, where she’s gone to chase down a clue, and size up the receptionist: “Her salt-and-pepper hair was heavy on the salt, shoulder length, and blunt cut. Her bifocals had beveled edges, with thin wire stems. The tops of the lenses were tinted blue and the bottoms tinted pink. … She looked like someone who’d carry a cat around while the office was closed for the lunch.”

Meow. And Grafton not only gives us Kinsey and her world-weariness—she always has a quip about what other women are wearing—but drops into the minds of the murder suspects, too, allowing them dozens of pages to establish their own humanity. There is Walker McNally, a sodden drunk for whom the pouring and stirring of a drink becomes a kind of sexual foreplay. There’s Jon Corso, a restless kid caught in the crossfire of a weenie professor father and a domineering mother-in-law. (“There was no court of appeals,” he laments.) And Shelly, a refugee of the '60s who doesn’t care for shaving and is fiercely vegetarian. Oh, and lately she’d rather you call her “Destiny.”

Warning: There is talk of social class here. Kinsey has a chip on her shoulder about the well-to-do folks in her California town, so read the book discreetly if flying first class. Grafton’s interest is in such friction, however—she gets turned on when sad, oafish yuppies are bold enough to commit a crime but not brave enough to see through its consequences. “It’s only in the movies the bad guys keep firing,” Kinsey tells us after discharging her Heckler & Koch pistol. “In real life, they sit down and behave.”

Read it? Absolutely.

Book review: U is for Undertow, Sue Grafton

From The Independent Weekly (Australia) --

Book review: U is for Undertow, Sue Grafton --

By DENISE PICKLES --
23 Dec, 2009 --

Kinsey Millhone is back for another outing as the series gets perilously close to the end of the alphabet. What fate awaits the doughty protagonist as Z advances?

In the late’ 80s, Kinsey is interviewing Michael Sutton. He is having a delayed reaction to something he saw when he was a small child in the late ’60s. Two days after Mary Claire Fitzhugh was kidnapped, Michael says he saw two men digging a hole that would accommodate the body of a small child. What the police find at the site when they dig it up gives Kinsey reason to extend her inquiries.

Meanwhile, also back in the late ’60s, Deborah Unruh has to give shelter to her dropout son and his heavily pregnant hippie girlfriend and her small son. When the child is born, Shelly, the mother, has no compunction about moving on with Greg, Deborah’s son, and leaving the child, Rain, to grow up as Deborah’s adored daughter.

The melding of these two threads is done well and the introduction of Kinsey’s family problems serves to keep the interest of the reader on the investigator.

The characters are believable, including, unfortunately, the baddies, who are very bad indeed. Michael Sutton, the fellow who starts Kinsey on the case, is a strange bird indeed.

Further chunks of Kinsey’s family are no doubt lying in wait for readers as the author approaches the terminus of the alphabet. – Macmillan, $32.99

BOOK REVIEW: Sue Grafton's latest is her best

From The Star Press (East Central Indiana) --

BOOK REVIEW: Sue Grafton's latest is her best --

By MARY FOSTER --
December 20, 2009 --

NEW ORLEANS - U Is for Undertow (A Marian Wood Book/Putnam, 403 pages, $27.95) by Sue Grafton - can it really be 27 years since Kinsey Millhone sifted through clues in A Is for Alibi?

And can Sue Grafton really be approaching the end of the alphabet?

The answers are yes, and yes, and as the end of the series looms, Grafton has never been better.

Millhone, who is still solving crimes in the 1980s and just about to turn 38, has changed little since that first novel. She's still living alone and slightly in love with her landlord, Henry.

By this time, though, the plot is more complicated than usual, and much darker.

Millhone is working in her office when a man shows up unannounced and tells her a recent newspaper article about a 20-year-old kidnapping has unleashed a flood of memories for him. It was his sixth birthday, Michael Sutton tells Millhone, when a 4-year-old-girl was kidnapped. In his recently restored memories, Sutton remembers being in the woods behind his house that day and he thinks he knows where child was buried.

Millhone is skeptical, but reluctantly agrees to devote a day to the case.

Among the first things she finds out is that Sutton has a reputation for not telling the truth. Still, there is something about his tale that rings true for her, so she pushes on.

In this novel, Grafton switches voices and points of view, leading the reader through distant events and current happenings.

"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 bad guys," Millhone writes. "Except at the end, of course."

The action switches between the 1980s, and Millhone's investigation, and the 1960s. In this earlier period, we meet Deborah Unruh, an upper middle class homemaker whose son Greg has dropped out of college and taken up with Shelley, an unpleasant young woman, and her 6-year-old son. The trio has been panhandling or outright stealing to make ends meet. But now Shelley is pregnant and they crash at the Unrhus in an old bus they park behind the house.

"What fascinates me about life is that now and then the past rises up and declares itself," Millhone writes by way of introducing her latest case. That also applies to her personal life.

As all fans know, Millhone is a loner, raised by a cantankerous aunt after her parents were killed in a car crash. Her feelings for family have been bitter and distant. Her mother was disowned for marrying her father and Millhone didn't know any of her relatives until a few books back.

That is another situation Millhone also needs to clear up, and in U is for Undertow, she finally does.

Closing in on the letter Z (Sue Grafton)

From Los Angeles Times --

Closing in on the letter Z --

By Sarah Weinman --
December 17, 2009 --

A talk with Sue Grafton about her latest Kinsey Millhone mystery, 'U Is for Undertow.' For the series' first half, people bet that she couldn't finish it. 'Now,' she says, 'they are rooting for me.'

Reporting from New York - In 1982, reviewing Sue Grafton's first private detective novel, "A Is for Alibi," the pseudonymous New York Times crime fiction critic Newgate Callendar wondered, "Will the series take hold? This first book is competent enough, but not particularly original." Twenty-seven years on, Callendar's dismissive attitude toward the book -- and its tough-minded thirtysomething heroine Kinsey Millhone -- demonstrates the dangers of prognostication and how instantaneous judgments don't age well.

Grafton's alphabet-titled series not only took hold, but the books are also available in 28 countries (and 26 languages) in abundant quantities, well into the millions of copies. In the last two years, Grafton has won lifetime achievement awards on both sides of the Atlantic. Without her and crime-writing colleagues Sara Paretsky and Marcia Muller, the female private detective subgenre would simply not exist. And with the end of the alphabet in sight, no author is more closely identified with reader expectations -- especially when "Z Is for Zero" shepherds Kinsey and her hometown of Santa Teresa to a fictional end.

Grafton has certainly reaped the rewards of this bigger picture: But what's been lost in the collective race toward the finish line is that Grafton, interviewed on the first day of her book tour for "U Is for Undertow" (Putnam: 404 pp., $27.95), has produced a better book each time out, and "U" is her most structurally complex, psychologically potent book to date.

The 69-year-old woman I met at the Four Seasons Hotel, where she stays regularly when visiting the city, was comfortable in the skin of her black sweater, gray speckled skirt and black boots. But just underneath the extroverted mask she presents at bookstore appearances is the deeply contemplative writer still determined to stretch her chops and chart territory that removes any semblance of a comfort zone. Rather than rest on her laurels, Grafton does the exact opposite.

The main story line in "U" concerns the disappearance of a 4-year-old girl in the late 1960s -- a topic "fraught with emotion" for Grafton, who has a granddaughter the same age.

"I could hardly bear the subject matter," she said. "Children are so precious, and it was very difficult to talk about the disappearance of a child, because I could identify all too well with the agony that parents and grandparents must go through."

Grafton had actively resisted working on such a story line for a while -- it was one of six possible plots she considered and took notes on for her previous book, "T Is for Trespass" -- but found it worked this time once she decided to keep the crime itself off-camera. While her books by definition deal with homicide and violence, Grafton doesn't want to "repel her readers" and rub the gory details in their faces.

Instead, Grafton is more concerned with what happens in the gray areas, when ordinary people cross the line.

"Many criminals are not evil people," she says. "They are not pathologically twisted. Many ordinary folk somehow wander from the straight and narrow. And those kinds of deviations and crimes are interesting to me because they are closer to the norm. They are outside what I consider acceptable behavior, but not as cut and dried."

Echoing her last two books, Grafton no longer relies on Kinsey as the sole narrator, but "U" goes a step further: There are several additional points of view from characters with deep connections to the kidnapped child, told in alternating time sequences between the late '60s and the "present day" of 1988. The added rigors kept Grafton off-balance in the two years it took to complete the novel.

"It was the most bizarre thing: I could 'see' the story, like it was a little light box, but I couldn't figure out how to break down the elements and how to present them, what was the beginning, middle and end," she said. "So I kept dumping it. But every time I would do that, it was like there was a figure tapping my shoulder, insisting I keep trying. I must have started the story wrong about three times. It was like throwing dinner plates at the wall in order to see what sticks."

As frustrating as the process is for her (Grafton confessed there were days she "nearly burst into tears" when the writing wasn't working), she takes comfort that she's gone through similar routines every time -- and can prove it by looking back to the voluminous journals she's kept for each of her books. (Notes dating back to "G Is for Gumshoe" are archived on her computer; Boston University, to which she donated her archives, houses the journals for the series' earliest installments.)

Of course, the looming specter of "Z" -- which will coincide with Kinsey's 40th birthday in 1990 -- can't be completely ignored. With just five more letters in the alphabet, Grafton estimates she'll be an octogenarian when she shuts the door on Kinsey -- and no, there won't be more using the Cyrillic alphabet, or double letters, or anything of the sort. "I'll never do linking titles again," she said.

But who's to say she needs to continue the sequence? She's the author, the god of her writing, and surely, she could stop whenever she likes?

"Well, I don't know," Grafton said, a half-smile on her face. "When I started writing the series, who even knew this was going to work? Was that gall, was I being cheeky or not? For the first half of the alphabet, people bet I couldn't [get to the end]. Now, they are rooting for me."

Talking to Grafton reveals some of the yin and yang between author and readers. On the one hand, she stresses that she "has to put up a wall" and tune out most of what they might suggest for Kinsey: "[They want her] to have more than one dress, get better haircuts, diet improved. If I did all that she wouldn't be Kinsey Millhone."

But a letter from a reader named Pat did spur one of the most important story pieces in "U": a deeper investigation of Kinsey's personal history (first delved into in "J Is for Judgment") and the motivations of both her rich, distant grandmother and her aunt and onetime guardian, Virginia. Why did this letter hit home more than any of the other missives that Grafton gets? "It was a message I must have been ready to receive," she said.

Grafton is also adamant that Hollywood won't get its hands on Kinsey. She's joked in the past that she'll haunt her kids if they ever capitulate, but the long-running reticence has concrete roots in the 16 years she spent as a screenwriter (the latter portion with her third and current husband, Steven Humphrey). "Part of my issue with Hollywood is that if an actress is attached to the series to play Kinsey, she's going to be in my head. I can't afford that. Once they own her, once money changes hands, [Hollywood] can do whatever they want."

She may have left the film and television world behind 20 years ago, but some lessons are hard to forget. "I know how those meetings sound and how the decisions are made," Grafton said. "They court you up front and all they want to do is get your stuff. Anyone who falls for it is a fool. It's like being picked up in a bar: If you really believe when the guy tells you you're beautiful, you're going to be in for a big surprise."

Quartet of crime-busters from arcane to addictive (Sue Grafton)

From Winnipeg Free Press --

Quartet of crime-busters from arcane to addictive --

By John Sullivan --
12/12/2009 --

Long-running mystery series ebb and flow, until they crash and burn, wither away or (rarely) expire with a bang, their stars deceased or honorably pensioned off.

So it's gratifying to find Sue Grafton still surfing the flow with the 21st Kinsey Millhone alphabet caper, U is for Undertow (Putnam, 416 pages, $35).

A poignant tale of lives left fractured by the accidental death of a four-year-old tot during a botched, decades-old kidnapping by a pair of troubled teens, Undertow has no true villains, only victims.

Grafton is sure-footed here, with Kinsey's familiar family-driven angst a backdrop to her realistic, methodical sorting of a pitiful crime involving all-too-human players. One of her best.

Q&A: Mystery Writer Sue Grafton (Sue Grafton)

From TIME --

Q&A: Mystery Writer Sue Grafton --

By Andrea Sachs --
Dec. 11, 2009 --

Mystery writer Sue Grafton has one of the most recognizable trademarks in fiction: the books in her series, from A Is for Alibi in 1982 to her new book, U Is for Undertow, are all named after a letter of the alphabet. That formula regularly takes Grafton's books to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, and Undertow is no exception. TIME senior reporter Andrea Sachs talked with the prolific author about the ABCs of writing crime novels during her recent visit to New York City.

What's the origin of the alphabet tradition?

In the back of my mind, when I thought I would write a mystery novel, I understood the virtue of having titles that readers-at-large could recognize so that they'd know you had a next book out. I was reading an Edward Gorey cartoon book called The Gashlycrumb Tinies, and his book is a series of pen-and-ink drawings of Victorian children being done in various ways. If you have not read it, it is truly amusing. His book goes, "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears. C is for Clara who [wasted away]," on down the alphabet. And I thought to myself, "God bless it. Why couldn't you base a series of crime novels on letters of the alphabet?" (See the top 10 fiction books of 2009.)

This is the 21st book in the series. How have you come up with so many different plots?

Part of what I do is keep charts of the books I've written, so I have a record of the gender of every killer, the gender of the victim, the motive for the crime and the nature of the climax — how does the book end? I also have a series of log lines for each book. In A Is for Alibi, Kinsey Milhone is hired to prove the innocence of a woman just out of prison for the murder of her husband. In B Is for Burglar, Kinsey Milhone is hired to find and get a signature on a minor document. So I know the setup for each book, and when I move to the next in the series, whatever that may be, I go back and review what I've done and figure out a way to come up with a story that is not a duplicate of something I've already done.

Tell me about your heroine, Kinsey Milhone. What is she like?

I claim she is a loner, and she is to a certain extent. She's perfectly happy in her own company. She says at one point, "I am not half of something looking for the other half." She's been married and divorced twice. She also says, "I keep my guard up along with my underpants." So she's careful about sexual connections with guys because to her it represents a hazard. She likes working for herself. She's persistent. She's curious. She's not above breaking and entering if she thinks she can do it without getting caught. Loves to lie — oh, she's so good at that, and kind of takes pride in it, you know. Eats bad food. Cuts her hair with a pair of nail scissors every six weeks. Owns one dress. Now she owns, actually, I think a skirt as well, and she's pretty proud of that. She has no clue about makeup or fashion, so she's always watching women, wondering how they figure it out, and she's not above imitating women if they'll give her a little counsel.

Is she like you? Is it at all autobiographical?

Yes. She is the person I might have been had I not married young and had children. When I was growing up, I didn't get, "You could be a police officer," which might have been really, really fun. I have great respect for law enforcement, and I think it is an interesting career. I worked in the medical field before my work began to support me, and I like medicine and I like law enforcement because they're life on the edge. You are dealing with people who are in trouble by in large, and you learn a lot about human nature from seeing people who are stressed out. I always say that I'm just like Kinsey Milhone unless you don't like her, and then I disavow any connection.

Your new book deals with false-memory syndrome. How did you become interested in that?

There have been many instances in cases where people have been accused of sexual molestation, sexual abuse, satanic rituals with children, where it is purely the artifact of a therapist who decides that you have this problem and little by little elicits memories from you that are totally false. They are planted; they are conjured out of smoke ... Eventually — sometimes, if you're lucky — these people will recant, but the torture they put their families through is incredible because there are some people who are sexually abused, so it's difficult to sort out the true from the false in that circumstance. What interested me was the whole issue of what happens if you have no credibility, what happens if you've been in this circumstance and you've accused your parents of dastardly deeds and then recanted, and then the next thing you come up with, nobody is going to believe you. So I thought that was an interesting idea, the boy who cried wolf.

You are nearing the end of the alphabet. What is going to happen?

Well, given that I have been doing two years between books, which is making my life bearable, that means I've got five books to go, which is 10 years. I just don't know if any of us know what we are going to be doing in 10 years. Maybe I'll get a nursing degree. Maybe I'll become a professional ballerina. I don't know. [Laughs.] And I don't know what's going to happen to Kinsey Milhone because it's none of my business until I get there. Each of her adventures that I document, she's generous enough, and I speak of her as though she were a real person, but after all these years of living with her, I think of her that way. So we'll see. I don't tell her; she tells me. I'm just along for the ride and happy to be part of her strange and glorious life.