Sue Grafton

R is for ricochet

Sarah Sammis

I have all Sue Grafton's alphabet series and I'm slowly working my way through them. I'm up R is for Ricochet which I've also listened to as an audio book. Although I'm not normally a fan of audio books, Grafton's books are more fun to listen to than to read.

In R is for Ricochet Kinsey Millhone is hired to drive a wealthy man's daughter, Reba, home from prison. She ends up becoming Reba's friend and through Reba ends up in the middle of a case involving money laundering and the mob.

Meanwhile in a stupid subplot Kinsey's landlord is having a midlife crisis and a turbid love affair with a flighty artist and old friends of Kinsey are trying to set her up with a boyfriend. Just shoot me.

If Grafton's books were set anywhere else I would have stopped reading them ages ago. I keep coming back not for Kinsey but for Santa Teresa. The town is based on Santa Barbara and by R is for Ricochet it's starting to look a whole lot like the town when I went to school there in the early 1990s. In this novel the S.T. equivalent of the Paseo Nuevo mall opens and it was fun to watch Kinsey and Reba skulking around in a place where I spent a lot of my free time.

I liked the romance in this one. I have jumped around in the series due to availability from the library, so I wondered where the references to her and Cheney originated.

The mystery itself was a little bland. Kinsey is more of a supporting character, which is weird for the series, Birmingham think Grafton wanted to play around a bit. It returns to the "status quo" in S if anyone is feeling deterred.

R is for ricochet

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