S is for Silence

S is for Silence by Sue Grafton

The easiest way to describe this book is that it’s an excellent book with a rotten ending.  That’s a bit like saying a guy is awfully handsome, yet he has an ugly face.  So a bit of explanation is necessary. (No spoilers ahead.  I promise).

Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone is at it again.  Our favorite 30-something, twice divorced P.I. is asked by a woman to research her mother’s disappearance.  Her mother actually disappeared 34 years ago when the daughter was still a child.  So this is not necessarily going to be an easy task.  Fortunately, there are lot of people around this small town that remember the events of 1953 quite well (present day in Grafton’s books are the mid to late 1980s), so Kinsey begins to slowly put some small, fragmented pieces together.

What makes this a book a breath of fresh air compared to the past Kinsey Milhone adventures, is that the entire tale is not told in first person by the character of Kinsey.  About 25% of this book takes us back to 1953, and we see a lot of the characters interact with one another that helps the reader have a clearer understanding of what exactly is going on in the story.  This works very effectively, and one hopes that Grafton would incorporate such a tactic in future novels (it also shows she’s not limited to “one kind” of prose).

Our missing woman is Violet Sullivan.  She’s essentially the town slut.  Violet and her lover Foley had to get married when she gets pregnant at 15.  By the time 1953 has arrived, it’s about seven years later, so the child, Daisy, is too young to understand much, other than her parents fight a lot.  Talk about a perilous relationship.  Foley beats Violet up quite frequently, yet we wonder – does he beat her up because she sleeps with everyone in town?  Or does she sleep with everyone in town because her husband beats her up?  Even though she walks around town with plenty of bruises and black eyes, this woman clearly appears to have the upper hand in this tumultuous relationship.  She would make the Greek goddess Aphrodite sit up and take notes.  So a lot of men take a tumble with her, yet they also fall for her.  And fall hard.  So when Violet disappears, no one is really surprised, regardless of whether foul play is involved or not.

So now I’ll jump to the ending without revealing anything (as promised).  When the mystery is finally solved, Grafton does a decent job of telling us the who and the how, but she doesn’t tell us the why.  I was so frustrated at the end of this book, that I rapidly flipped through the last few pages thinking “there has to be a missing chapter here”.  I’ve never been so frustrated at the end of a book before.  I was so frustrated, that I did a Google search to see if there was any enlightenment out there in the virtual world.  Not surprising, it seems there were many gripes similar to mine.  I came across one reader who actually detailed what she thought was the “why,” yet confessed that she had to read the entire book over again.  She then went on to say something like “I don’t want read a book this hard to figure out the ending”.  Excellent sentiments.

Even though you can go back and put the pieces of the puzzle together yourself, Grafton could have very easily added a quick paragraph or two at the end simply summarizing what  we found out earlier in the book, and why Kinsey came to the right conclusion.  Sadly, that’s missing.

Whenever Kinsey is trying to solve a mystery, she uses 3X5 notecards to notate all of her findings, so she can easily later reference them.  It almost seems that, as the reader, I probably should have done the same thing.  Not a good thing.

Oh Ms. Grafton, you were so close!