W is for Wasted

W is for Wasted by Sue Grafton

Kinsey Milhone is back for her 23rd crime solving adventure.  If you’ve read any of these, you know the drill.  This book was very good - not one of the best, but far from the worst.  Sometimes I wonder if Sue Grafton actually gets a bit tired of Kinsey.  I know I certainly do.  When you name your books after the letters of the alphabet, however, you probably feel a bit obligated to get all the way through the letter “Z” before you write anything else.

For Grafton’s last several books, she’s slightly altered her style and told some of the story in third person - focusing on different characters other than Kinsey.  I find this incredibly refreshing since these diversions are a nice change of pace, and leads me to believe that Grafton might actually succeed even better if she took a temporary detour from the “Alphabet Mysteries”.  I’m guessing that won’t happen, however, at least until the conclusion of book number 26.

A bit odd since the word in the title represented by the corresponding letter of the alphabet really has nothing (to my knowledge) with the story itself.  I’m not sure who, or what is actually “wasted” in this story, but it is somewhat of a moot point.  Grafton delivers as she normally does, and had this book been my ninth or tenth as opposed to my twenty-third, I’m sure I would have enjoyed it significantly better than I did.

For this book, two seemingly unrelated deaths happen before our story begins.  One death is of a sleazy private investigator (Pete) and the other is a homeless man living on the beach.  Kinsey is dragged into the saga because it seems that the unknown vagrant had Kinsey’s name and phone number in his possession when he died.  So the saga begins.

Well, the main criticism of Sue Grafton’s writing is that she goes into descriptive overload.  She spends just as much time telling you the mundane goings on of Kinsey’s day to day life as she does focusing on the actual plot.  This tends to get old.  I’l admit that Sue Grafton actually does a very good job of this.  There aren’t that many authors that can spend an entire page and a half describing someone packing a lunch and keeping the reader somewhat interested.  It’s just that after 23 books…..well…it does get a bit old.  I found myself skimming/skipping the parts of the book where such events are described.

This was a bit frustrating for this book in particular since I felt that the actual story could have been told in better detail.  By the time I got to the last 20 pages, I felt like there needed to be at least 50 more, and Grafton wraps up the story in, what I felt, was a bit of a hurried fashion since we had already passed the 400 page mark.  I felt a bit cheated since I wanted more of the actual plot.

I’m sure I’ll read X,Y and Z when they come out, but I’m looking forward to some variety by this wonderful author one day in the future.