V is for Vengeance

V is for Vengeance – by Sue Grafton

As author Sue Grafton gets closer and closer to the end of the alphabet, I’m sure one of the most frequently asked questions that she receives is “What are you going to do when you run out of letters?”  I’m not sure how she answers this, but I would like to respectfully suggest that she retire Kinsey Milhone and move on to something else.

That’s not to say she should retire from writing permanently.  Oh no.  Sue Grafton is still a great writer.  It just seems to me that the Kinsey Milhone shtick is now just old, and it’s time for something fresh.  Actually, I think Grafton is somewhat aware of this as well, and she’s done things a bit differently on this, and the last couple of books.  She’s telling a portion of the story in third person about other characters in the book besides Kinsey.  It’s only after the reader is well into the book that they see how these narratives will eventually connect.  This new direction seems very fresh and exciting, and the author shows us that she’s capable of telling a great tale, even if her focus isn’t on her favorite private investigator.

In fact, when the book changes chapters and we go back to the “first person” narrative of Kinsey, I noticed that I tended to get disappointed.  You see, nothing really that exciting ever happens to Kinsey as she’s sleuthing her way through these third rate crimes.  I feel like I’ve read all of this before.  Many times, in fact.  This really isn’t a bad thing for a handful of books – reading the same observations from a character about life over and over again, but after 21 books, well……

Then there’s the problem that Grafton (and maybe this is actually Kinsey) has “Description Diarrhea”.  Nobody goes into as much descriptive analysis about anything and everything as Milhone/Grafton.  Whenever Kinsey gets out of her car, for example, and walks into a restaurant, it takes the reader three pages to arrive at the same destination.  We have to hear everything about the neighborhood, the parking lot, the restaurant décor, the people she sees in the parking lot, etc.  etc.

At one point in this book, Kinsey is going on a stakeout.  It would be sufficient if the author would tell us that she “packs a lunch”.  But no.  We have to hear about every single item that is going into the lunch bag, along with why she is choosing the particular foodstuff.  She even goes into detail about how she packs all of these items, along with the description of the baggies, how she folds them, etc.   

Oy.

Still, this book was par for the course.  Plot wise, it’s a bit inconsequential for me to describe.  Again, these tales aren’t really the makings of major blockbuster whodunnits, this is simply a thirty something private eye trying to make a living by putting together pieces of a complicated puzzle.  I imagine if you’re brand new to the series, you could really like this book.  If you’ve read every volume (such as myself), you might be tempted to yawn at the repetitive nature of every one of these books.  If you’re somewhere in the middle, you’re likely to enjoy the overall narrative.  I was pleased.

I just hope one day we get different tales from this author.  I have a feeling that they would be stellar.  I just hope if we do see such works, Grafton realizes that “more” isn’t necessarily “better” and eases off on description overkill.