10:49 PM
Books REVIEW | Q is for Quarry by Sue Grafton

This one is spooky. The ending, not the ending of the story but the part by the author at the end. Turns out it's based on a real murder, a Jane Doe who was killed in August of 1969 and never identified and her killer never caught. In the course of writing this book and going her own way with her fictional Jane Doe, she helped the Santa Barbara police get the real Jane Doe exhumed and a facial reconstruction done to try to help get her identified. There's pictures of Jane Doe at the end. It's just kind of spooky.

The book was good tho, Sue Grafton just keeps writing them well, gradually filling in more of her main character, Kinsey Milhone. This one has quite a bit of info about her parents and her mother's family and there's lots of stuff to fill in the timeline of her mother's life and hers, I had a bit of a struggle trying to figure out when/where/who for a bit, especially since Kinsey lags behind real time, this book is set in 1986. Interestingly, we find out (or at least I finally figured out) in this one that Kinsey's parents were married for almost 14 years before she was born. Kinsey's mother was 18 in 1935 and Kinsey wasn't born until 1949, then her parents were killed five? years later, so they were married almost 19 years. Since Kinsey was so young when they were killed, I'd always kind of figured that they'd only been married six to eight or nine years, I didn't realize that she'd been born so much later after they got married. (This is partly why I like Grafton's books, figuring out all the pieces of Kinsey's life as well as whatever case she's investigating.)

Anyway, case is interesting too, good build-up and I liked the different locale for most of the book. And Rosie's new recipes! I'd have left town too! Stacey Oliphant was a great character, I hope she keeps him around in future books for awhile at least, I loved her turning him on to junk food and enjoying it as much as she did.

So another good book in the alphabet series, I'll have to check Sue Grafton's website to see if there's any word on the real Jane Doe's identity.