U Is For Undertow
Library Journal
With each book, Grafton is only getting better. Her Kinsey Millhone series is now in its 21st installment but is nowhere near past its prime. A young man named Michael Sutton shows up at Kinsey's office one afternoon, claiming to have suddenly recalled details from his childhood concerning an unsolved kidnapping of a little girl 20 years ago. Kinsey is skeptical but agrees to work for one day on the cold case. And so it begins. Weaving the narrative and point of view between events and characters in the 1980s and the 1960s, it is not until the breathless final pages that everything connects. VERDICT Readers will not abandon Kinsey Millhone as the series winds down (only five left, VWXYZ!). Her latest is fresh, complex, fast-paced, and immensely enjoyable. Kinsey's sharp 1980s research skills might even leave a few readers nostalgic for a pre-Google world. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 8/09.]?Andrea Y. Griffith, Loma Linda Univ. Libs., CA