M is for Malice - Sue Grafton

This is the 13th installment in the Alphabet series. Kinsey is still living in the 80s, still wearing her turtlenecks and driving an old VW car. There's something that I appreciate about the books still be set back in the 80s. Large portions of time don't pass for Kinsey so the timeline is relatively truncated, even though after 13 books I feel like Kinsey should be using a cell phone by now.

In this one, Kinsey is hired by her cousin Tasha to locate a missing person who stands to inherit a lot of money from a will. At first I was a bit annoyed that Kinsey is still so reluctant to spend time with her newly found cousins. (New to the series? Kinsey's parents were killed in a car accident when she was little. She was raised by her aunt. Her aunt has since died too. Her mother and her aunt were two disowned children of some apparently super rich family in a nearby town. They never looked for Kinsey. She's bitter). Anyway, now her cousins have found her, they are interested in having a better relationship with her but she's not having it. And she bitches about it a lot. And part of me thinks, "get over it already." But having read the first paragraph of this review, I realized that although this has been four or five books coming already, it's only about 6 months in Kinsey time. So really, she hasn't had that much time to adjust yet. Sorry Kinsey, I'll stop judging you about this... for now.

Anyway, so Kinsey is sent to track down Guy Malek, the youngest of four brothers and black sheep of the family. The other brothers, hardworking Donovan, jealous Bennett, and golf pro Jack, all would like nothing more than for their younger, former addict brother Guy to remain missing so they can cut him out of the will and share in his $5 million portion of their father's estate. But Kinsey finds him and brings him back. Hmmm... that was short - it takes about 100 pages or less for this to happen. And I was thinking... what's the rest of the book going to be about. 

Oh wait, then Guy... well something happens to Guy and THAT is where the mystery really takes off. I actually was able to pick up a few of the plot points ahead of time. Good for me. I usually am pretty slow on the uptake of those.

This book had the return of Dietz, Kinsey's erstwhile love interest. It also featured Jonah Robb which I thought would be included more in the book, but he only shows up once and Kinsey and he do not have a big scene together. It's somewhat dissatisfying. I'm giving this one three stars because it got pretty slow there in the middle and there were these weird elements hanging out there, but I'm definitely going to keep reading this series. It's kind of a nice break from heavier literature.

3/5 Stars.