"J" Is for judgment

Clever, sassy, devil-may-care California P.I. Kinsey Millhone is back in Grafton's tenth book in the popular series. This time the intrepid sleuth is investigating a fraud case. Wendell Jaffe, a local businessman, set up a fraudulent Ponzi scheme and then disappeared, leaving his wife and business partner to deal with the creditors. His wife had Jaffe declared dead after five years and picked up a half-million-dollar life-insurance settlement. Now Jaffe's supposedly been sighted in Mexico. If he's still alive, the insurance company wants its money back and hires Kinsey to find out what's what. Kinsey figures that if Jaffe is alive he'll show up eventually to see his son's new baby. In an odd subplot that never goes anywhere, Kinsey discovers she has relatives. This shocker--coming after years of believing herself alone in the world--leads to some philosophical musing on the value of family and the risks of becoming involved, but, like most philosophers, she never really decides anything. Even though the mystery of what's happened to the elusive Jaffe eventually is solved, many readers are likely to feel as if all the bits and pieces of the confusing, meandering plot never quite come together. A ragtag assortment of trite, shallow characters in supporting roles doesn't help matters, either. Of course, the thousands of card-carrying Kinsey devotees aren't likely to notice any of this, and libraries will be obligated to buy multiple copies as usual to fill demand. Let's hope, though, that by the time Grafton finishes her next book in the series, she'll have realized the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach isn't enough to hold a mystery series together through 16 more letters of the alphabet. Kinsey desperately needs some meaty plots and clever villains if Grafton is going to jump start a series whose battery seems nearly dead. (Reviewed Mar. 15, 1993)0805019359Emily Melton

In her 10th alphabet adventure, southern California PI Kinsey Milhone is working again for California Fidelity, navigating her way through a plot-driven tale that will remind readers of her earliest appearances, despite Grafton's deft introduction of new material. Shady financier Wendell Jaffe has recently been decreed dead, five years after his real estate empire collapsed and he disappeared from his beloved 35-foot ketch off the coast, an apparent suicide. California Fidelity has just paid his widow $500,000. But then Jaffe is spotted in Mexico with another woman. Kinsey's investigation lands her in some tough spots--such as a drunken stranger's hotel room where she pretends to be a hooker--gets her shot at and leads to a dramatic resolution at sea. It also introduces her to a genealogist who requires Kinsey to revise her notion of herself as an orphan alone in the world. While maintaining full control of her plot's variously colored threads, many of which are tied to Jaffe's family (his 18-year-old son is on the lam from a murder charge), Grafton cameos such familiar characters as Kinsey's octogenarian landlord Henry, his older brother William, and Rose, the neighborhood bar owner. But the spotlight remains on Kinsey who, without a love interest to distract her, sticks to the case at hand and tries, with limited success, to assimilate the existence of a not too distant family, whom readers will likely learn more of in ``K.'' 500,000 first printing; major ad/promo; Literary Guild selection; author tour. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Private investigator Kinsey Millhone, the author's tough, tenacious, California-based heroine, has taken on a freelance job for her ex-employer, California Fidelity Insurance. One of their agents, on vacation in a small Mexican hotel, is sure he recognized Wendell Jaffe, a hotshot businessman who'd vanished from his boat at sea years before, leaving behind a suicide note, a clutch of cheated investors, a penniless wife, two young sons, and a partner, Carl Eckert, who wound up in jail. Five years later, just a few months ago, with Jaffe now officially dead, wife Dana had collected a half million from Fidelity. They'd like it back.... Kinsey flies to Mexico and finds her quarry, who's now living with a woman named Renata and is calling himself Dean DeWitt Huff--and who disappears again almost at once. Kinsey's certain the recent widely reported criminal acts of his son Brian have pulled Jaffe back to the US. In California, Kinsey's on the trail again--talking to Dana, to Carl Eckert, now out of jail, to police detectives involved in the original investigation, and to Renata, who, it turns out, owns a waterfront house near Kinsey's home base of Santa Teresa. Even as she chases clues in the present, chunks of Kinsey's own family history intrude, threatening her hard-won loner persona. Jaffe surfaces for the last time in the slightly hokey finale. A tangled, rambling story that's constantly in motion but generates little passion, heat, or tension. Solidly readable but minus the compelling edge of Grafton's best. (First printing of 500,000; Literary Guild Triple Selection for July)