U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton
Kinsey Milhone returns for episode twenty-one in Sue Grafton’s alphabet series. The irrepressible Milhone still lives in fictional Santa Teresa, owns that single all-purpose black dress, trims her hair with fingernail scissors, and – most importantly – still lives in 1988 where (or is it when?) she's about to turn thirty-eight. At least readers can be certain that, unlike Linda Fairstein’s Alexandra Cooper, Kinsey won't ever find herself in grave peril because her cellphone battery just died. Heck, Milhone still doesn’t even own a fax machine…
Kinsey’s latest case finds her caught up in a late-eighties whirlwind, the recalled memory phenomenon (remember that? sure you do…) Her client claims to have recalled seeing two men burying something in his neighborhood his sixth birthday, the recall prompted by one of those “twentieth-anniversary” newspaper articles about the kidnapping of a local child. Could he have seen the kidnappers burying little Mary Claire Fitzhugh? For the sum of $500 (a lot for a PI in 1988…), Kinsey does basic legwork to find the house in question and the possible burial site. She succeeds, and even talks STPD into bringing out a cadaver dog. Sure enough, they find a body… of a dog: so much for her client’s credibility.
Like a terrier with a bone, Kinsey refuses to let go of the case; even after her client’s one-day fee is all used up. Something bothers her about all this, of course (otherwise there’d be no book twenty-one). As one might expect, she accidentally trips over the actual kidnappers… with the usual results.
U is for Undertow (weird choice of titles – maybe U is for Underground would have been better?) builds a plot with flashbacks and a parallel character-development, all centered on a well-to-do neighborhood of St. Terry’s. There’s the Unruh family, with their son and his beatnik-then-hippie girlfriend/common-law wife (she’s morphs from a slut beatnik in 1963 to a drug-addict hippie in 1967). There’s Walker McNally (son of Walter McNally: what an unfortunate naming convention), high-school drug dealer in 1967 and drunk in 1988. There’s Jon Corso, a high-schooler with a stepmother problem in 1967 and a bestselling author in 1988. Grafton’s plot bounces among the four groups of characters and the three different years.
The fact that Grafton only introduces five characters who were present in 1967 effectively limits the field of suspects in the kidnapping; and since she kills off two of them by the middle of the book, the bad guys are pretty much wearing bright red targets. Of course, Kinsey doesn’t know all this, so this is a semi-omniscient reader plot. Whatever. Everyone knows how it’ll turn out, after all… After we’ve figured out whodunnit, the rest of the novel is merely a matter of wondering where they hid the body and how Kinsey will ultimately nail ‘em. On those fronts, Grafton has done her usual workmanlike job.
I found several lines in U is for Undertow to be head-scratchers of the anachronism variety. Grafton has a number of characters running five to seven miles or swimming daily: this is in 1963, back when Nike was barely a gleam in Phil Knight’s eye. Another character is seen drinking Diet Pepsi in 1964 – technically possible, but unlikely, especially since the character is a middle-aged male. And I wouldn’t bet that there were many leafblowers on the streets of LA in 1967, just nine years after the infernal device was patented. Could be, though…
Overall, Kinsey’s return is just a middling entry in the series, mainly because Grafton expends more energy on painting ancillary characters as evil than she does on developing motivation for her actual villains. In that, she could’ve done a lot better.
Kinsey Milhone returns for episode twenty-one in Sue Grafton’s alphabet series. The irrepressible Milhone still lives in fictional Santa Teresa, owns that single all-purpose black dress, trims her hair with fingernail scissors, and – most importantly – still lives in 1988 where (or is it when?) she's about to turn thirty-eight. At least readers can be certain that, unlike Linda Fairstein’s Alexandra Cooper, Kinsey won't ever find herself in grave peril because her cellphone battery just died. Heck, Milhone still doesn’t even own a fax machine…
Kinsey’s latest case finds her caught up in a late-eighties whirlwind, the recalled memory phenomenon (remember that? sure you do…) Her client claims to have recalled seeing two men burying something in his neighborhood his sixth birthday, the recall prompted by one of those “twentieth-anniversary” newspaper articles about the kidnapping of a local child. Could he have seen the kidnappers burying little Mary Claire Fitzhugh? For the sum of $500 (a lot for a PI in 1988…), Kinsey does basic legwork to find the house in question and the possible burial site. She succeeds, and even talks STPD into bringing out a cadaver dog. Sure enough, they find a body… of a dog: so much for her client’s credibility.
Like a terrier with a bone, Kinsey refuses to let go of the case; even after her client’s one-day fee is all used up. Something bothers her about all this, of course (otherwise there’d be no book twenty-one). As one might expect, she accidentally trips over the actual kidnappers… with the usual results.
U is for Undertow (weird choice of titles – maybe U is for Underground would have been better?) builds a plot with flashbacks and a parallel character-development, all centered on a well-to-do neighborhood of St. Terry’s. There’s the Unruh family, with their son and his beatnik-then-hippie girlfriend/common-law wife (she’s morphs from a slut beatnik in 1963 to a drug-addict hippie in 1967). There’s Walker McNally (son of Walter McNally: what an unfortunate naming convention), high-school drug dealer in 1967 and drunk in 1988. There’s Jon Corso, a high-schooler with a stepmother problem in 1967 and a bestselling author in 1988. Grafton’s plot bounces among the four groups of characters and the three different years.
The fact that Grafton only introduces five characters who were present in 1967 effectively limits the field of suspects in the kidnapping; and since she kills off two of them by the middle of the book, the bad guys are pretty much wearing bright red targets. Of course, Kinsey doesn’t know all this, so this is a semi-omniscient reader plot. Whatever. Everyone knows how it’ll turn out, after all… After we’ve figured out whodunnit, the rest of the novel is merely a matter of wondering where they hid the body and how Kinsey will ultimately nail ‘em. On those fronts, Grafton has done her usual workmanlike job.
| Grafton’s heroine has changed little from the previous twenty novels; still slogging three miles down the beach every morning and still addicted to QPs with cheese (though she’s beginning to realize that her thighs will be the same shape as a QP if she doesn’t lay off). She still hangs with all those octo- and nonogenarians in her landlord’s family, and still eats most of her meals at Rosie’s place. No pets, a ’71 Mustang (the VW Beetle has been recycled), and an H & K locked in a briefcase locked in the trunk. A subplot involving an impending Kinsey family reunion also runs through the book, and Kinsey learns a fascinating fact about her Aunt “Gin” (Virginia). Family ties are very much the subtext of U is for Undertow: shattered families, grandparents adopting an abandoned child, an ugly stepmother, and Kinsey’s bizarre family dynamic. Another thick thread of the plot is Grafton’s obvious distaste for the hippie lifestyle; as she paints her flower children as drug-addled leeches who live by begging and stealing – she even kills one off via drug overdose and another via AIDS (in 1984? gimme a break). Having married young, one imagines that Grafton’s distaste might be tinged by jealousy over all the fun the flower children had… |
Overall, Kinsey’s return is just a middling entry in the series, mainly because Grafton expends more energy on painting ancillary characters as evil than she does on developing motivation for her actual villains. In that, she could’ve done a lot better.
1 comment:
Thank you for answering the question about the leaf blower! I haven't finished the book yet, but that really bugged me.
Post a Comment