The Best One Yet

F is for Fugitive:  Kinsey Milhone #6 by Sue Grafton

Mystery

This book is the best one to date!  I hope that trend continues with the series.  If I use alphabetic math (the only kind of math I know), the series should get 20x better by  the last one.  Z is for ?  What in the world will Grafton think of?

Kinsey Milhone usually sticks close to home for her cases, but since her apartment is still under renovation (someone blew it up trying to kill her) and her office is closed (someone tried to frame her for fraud and murder), Kinsey decides to take a working vacation at the beach.  Kinsey is hired to solve a 20-year old murder case of a local teenager.  The hotel's owner is a dying man and wants to see his son's name cleared of the crime.

The 'F' for fugitive is for Bailey, the rumored teen-turned-murderer, now escaped and on the loose and communicating only with Kinsey, who is desperately working to figure out  a decades old crime.

Grafton's description of the setting in this book, the hotel, was spot on.  I can picture it, so similar to a cheesy and damp Daytona Beach hotel we stayed in last summer.  A cold wetness just kept seeping between my toes and I couldn't wipe it off; the sand irritating in my shoes.  Everything was damp and decaying-a slow death and Grafton captured it perfectly.

This one is  a little different from some of Kinsey's other books.  This one was filled with a lot of sadness.  Is it because the murdered girl was so young?  The reader really gets to see how the murder affects the families of everyone involved, including the murderer himself.  You don't have to read the books in order but it helps with the subplots of the minor characters.  And, since it's ABC, it isn't really too hard to keep track of which ones you've read.