Q Is For Quarry (Kinsey Millhone Mystery)

Q Is For Quarry (Kinsey Millhone Mystery)
by Sue Grafton

Q Is For Quarry (Kinsey Millhone Mystery)
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Book Summary Information

Author: Sue Grafton
Edition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-09-30
ISBN: 0425192725
Number of pages: 351
Publisher: Berkley

Book Reviews of Q Is For Quarry (Kinsey Millhone Mystery)

Book Review: Fictionalized version of authentic cold case
Summary: 4 Stars

Kinsey Millhone is an established private investigator in Santa Teresa, California. She is finally on her own, in an office that leaves much to be desired. It is spring.
Lieutenant Con Dolan drops by. Dolan is the semi-retired head of the Santa Teresa Police Department's Homicide unit. Dolan wants to wants to reopen an old murder investigation as a way of cheering up his friend and mentor, Stacey Oliphant, who is dying of cancer. The murder is one that Oliphant investigated, but never solved.
Dolan himself is not healthy. He has had several heart attacks, and his lifestyle invites another.
The victim was a teenage girl, whose body had been dumped down an embankment, from a highway. Her hands had been bound together with wire, her throat had been slashed, and she had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest. She seems to have been hitchhiking through town, perhaps going northward. She had remained unidentified.
Kinsey agrees to help as a paid consultant, and to do the necessary legwork that Dolan and Oliphant are not healthy enough to do. There is already a very likely suspect for the murder, Frankie Miracle, who is on parole after serving time for another murder. But, Kinsey and the others can't quite manage to find the evidence that would pin this murder on him. They keep digging, and things get complicated.
They find someone willing to go to great lengths to make sure that the past remains buried.

In my opinion, the novel opens brilliantly. Con Dolan and Stacey Oliphant are characters that readers will care about and find interesting, and the case that they want to re-investigate is intriguing.
The story develops logically. The writing, as with all Grafton novels, is interesting and often amusing.
This novel contains an especially good portrayal of the deleterious effects that false information can have upon police work, and how a change in just a couple of supposed facts can completely re-orient a case. It falls mainly to Kinsey to do the constant digging, constant theorizing, and constant winnowing of new theories that is necessary to finally arrive at a theory that is not false. Kinsey is shrewd enough to do it.
"Q" is for Quarry, like other Kinsey Millhone novels, is worth reading largely because of the characters, the interactions between them, and because of Kinsey herself. Especially strong characters are Con Dolan and Stacey Oliphant, and Henry Pitts, the retired baker who is Kinsey Millhone's landlord, and Henry's wacky friends.
In other ways, Q is for Quarry is a letdown, especially after the excellent P is for Peril. Toward the end of the book there is a proliferation of named characters who are hard to keep straight. There are silly patches. Very few small town women, for example, would divorce their husbands after decades of marriage simply because they learned that he had not been a virgin on their wedding night.
People have a remarkable propensity to confess things to Kinsey that they have not told to those closest to them, even though they frequently dislike Kinsey. Sometimes it is because Kinsey pursues the truth like a terrier, but sometimes it just happens.
The novel has Kinsey's (and Grafton's) personality woven into it. Crooks who successfully work the system, or who try to work the system, are favorite objects of scorn. And as Grafton has observed elsewhere, "You can't save anyone except yourself."

This novel is based on a genuine cold case. An account of the true crime and a reconstruction of the victim's features are given after the novel in hope of inducing someone to come forward with relevant information.

Summary of Q Is For Quarry (Kinsey Millhone Mystery)

She was a "Jane Doe," an unidentified white female whose decomposed body was discovered near a quarry off California's Highway 1. The case fell to the Santa Teresa County Sheriff's Department, but the detectives had little to go on. The woman was young, her hands were bound with a length of wire, there were multiple stab wounds, and her throat had been slashed. After months of investigation, the case remained unsolved. That was eighteen years ago. Now, the two men who found the body, both nearing the end of long careers in law enforcement, want one last shot at the case. Old and ill, they need someone to do the legwork for them, and they turn to Kinsey Millhone. They will, they tell her, find closure if they can just identify the victim. Kinsey is intrigued with the challenge and agrees to work with them. But revisiting the past can be a dangerous business, and what begins with the pursuit of Jane Doe's real identity ends in a high-risk hunt for her killer.

Private investigator Kinsey Millhone has served Sue Grafton well through 16 letters of the alphabet in a perennially popular series that occasionally breaks new ground but more often traverses familiar territory, as is the case here. Two old, ailing cops--one retired, the other disabled--try to breathe some life into an 18-year-old mystery that haunts them both for different reasons. They enlist Kinsey's help in identifying the victim, a young woman who was murdered and left for dead in the old quarry of the title. Neither they nor Kinsey expect that reopening an old case will incite the killer to strike again--not once, but twice. And while the real case of the still-unidentified victim that inspired this fictionalized scenario continues to languish in the cold case file in the Santa Barbara sheriff's office, Grafton's solution is as plausible as any. While the unlikely trio of Millhone and her cranky geezer sidekicks offers a few chuckles, the inner reaches of Kinsey's soul remain largely inaccessible to her as well as to the reader, which will probably not bother most of Kinsey's or Grafton's many admirers. --Jane Adams

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