M Is for Malice (Kinsey Millhone Mysteries)
by Sue Grafton
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sue GraftonEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1997-11-26
ISBN: 0449223604
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Fawcett
Book Reviews of M Is for Malice (Kinsey Millhone Mysteries)
Book Review: Slow-paced, cliche detective story with some familiar, likable characters, a breezy tone, and some substance to the plot
Summary: 3 Stars
As soon as I read her earliest books, Sue Grafton became one of my favorite writers of light, straight, credible detective fiction. She can be a terrific storyteller. After rallying from the skimpy, disorganized "G" and "H" stories with stronger efforts in "I," "J," and "K," the "Lawless" book returned to the bottom of the heap. So I was not sure what to expect from "M." At least the book explains, "Mill-hone, ... Accent on the first syllable. The last rhymes with bone."
The book is very slow to get started. The murder does not happen until page 200. Even after it does, the book continues to drag at a self-indulgently slow, lackadaisical pace. The murder is a crude, boring bashing-in of a person's head while he is sleeping, so there is nothing clever or interesting about the method or any detection related thereto.
It looks as if someone from missing heir Guy Malek's bad-boy past has come back to kill him once Millhone runs him to earth for his construction company boss father as a now-humble, changed man. Millhone suspects the crime has its roots in a personal connection, fraud, and death from years ago. Without giving it away, the plot is a familiar cliche, embroidered with some complicated and sentimental details. So intent is the book on making Guy into a sympathetic character that it does not even have the courage of its convictions about his supposedly disreputable past. The characters are hazy and unmemorable.
Again, Grafton paints on some personal subplots. Millhone gets involved in the case because of her relative Tasha. The book mentions Henry Pitts and his brother William and ethnic wife, who runs the diner up the street. The book injects P.I. Robert Dietz into the story. But this is all tacked on, superficially, with no meaningful connection or theme, just as Grafton's attempts to forge a link between Millhone and Guy Malek fall flat. These personal angles seem to get ever more perfunctory; reviews that find great meaning in those in "M" are fooling themselves.
What distinguishes this book for me was its carefree, easy confidence, which makes it breezy reading in one sense. But it also makes the book slack, uninvolving storytelling that only really picks up in the last 50 pages. The book certainly has more to it than "L." "M" is in the ballpark of "J" or "K" only because, though hardly original, its plot ends up being more focused, coherent, and meaningful than those books.
Summary of M Is for Malice (Kinsey Millhone Mysteries)
"M" is for money. Lots of it. "M" is for Malek Construction, the $40 million company that grew out of modest soil to become one of the big three in California and, uniquely, remains in family hands. Eighteen years ago, one of the sons of the family went missing. Now "M" is for Millhone, hired to trace that missing black sheep. Though Kinsey Millhone succeeds in her search, this prodical son will find no welcome at his family's table. And, in the all-too-common outcome of familial hate "M" winds up standing for murder.Kinsey Millhone, the normally bubbly California private investigator, is depressed in Sue Grafton's new alphabet mystery; so depressed she goes back with old flame Robert Dietz for a while. Bad move. Meanwhile she gets wrapped up in a family affair, locating the missing heir to a fortune and then protecting him from his ill-intentioned brothers. Typically, our woman Kinsey has little patience with the boys, but a firm grasp of family dysfunction.
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