V is for Vengeance - Sue Grafton

Back in April of 2012, I read the first of Sue Grafton's Alphabet series in about six days. The books have become a bit more sophisticated since then, and longer, so this one took a bit longer to read. Every year for the past four years, I've thought that maybe I'd get to the end of the series or at least catch up to Grafton, who continues to write these books as if the 80s never died. This actually may be the year. X came out last year and it's patiently waiting in my kindle to be read. So there is only W standing between me and the current end of the series. 

V finds us hopping around in narrative view point between Kinsey, a quasi gangster named Lorenzo Dante, and a bored socialite, Nora Vogelsang and it all begins with Kinsey shopping for underwear. While at the store, Kinsey spots Audrey Vance slip a couple pairs of very expensive pajamas into a bag. Because she has an overly developed sense of justice, Kinsey turns the woman into the store clerk and an eventual arrest is made. When Audrey Vance turns up dead after taking a spill off a local bridge and into a ravine, Kinsey is hired by the woman's former fiancee to unravel what happened. 

This leads Kinsey into a very organized retail theft ring headed by Lorenzo Dante. Because we have Lorenzo's point of view, we know early on that Audrey was helped in her trip over the bridge by Lorenzo's bumbling but violent brother Cappi. Most of Dante's portions of the book are meant to humanize him. He's a gangster with heart. He never orders any of the violence Cappi performs, he's sorry for those things. He had a close relationship with his mother, who left the family when Dante was young. His father was violent and beat Dante as a child, and now Dante has fallen in love with Nora. The sections from Nora's point of view, in hindsight, seem the most irrelevant and unnecessary in the book, but because the book is set up like a mystery novel, you're not sure of this until the very end. The thing that didn't work for me, was that as judgmental as Kinsey was about the harm that retail theft does, she seemed awful quick to want to forgive Dante for his hand in the entire thing, which was to actually be the head of it all. 

Thrown in is a side drama involving Pinky Ford, who gave Kinsey her set of key picks which come up about once a book, and his wife Dodie. Why Kinsey feels so inclined to stick her neck out for Pinky in this book is a mystery in and of itself and seemed more like a stretch to make a plot point work. 

This was definitely not my favorite of the alphabet mysteries. Most of them get a solid 3 stars, but since this one had so many off elements, it's only getting two.

2/5 stars.