for Outlaw, the reader learns about Kinsey’s first husband, Mickey Magrunder, a police officer to whom she was married for nine months. Betrayal, isolation, and troubled family relations—particularly events in a family’s history that create problems in the present—are themes that penetrate all the novels in the series.

Kinsey is thirty-two at the start of the series and ages only a few months with every book, so that most of the series takes place in the 1980’s. This allows Kinsey to continue to live in a world without cell phones, computers, and Internet access, and her investigations use the telephone, face-to-face interviews, notebooks, surveillance, and index cards, which she uses to focus her thoughts. She types her reports on a manual Smith-Corona typewriter.

Grafton uses the first person for most of the series, speaking through Kinsey, although she alternates Kinsey’s voice with that of a third-person narrator in “S” Is for Silence (2005). Most of the novels open with Kinsey describing how she got the case and include a self-introduction very similar to the one that opens the first book in the series: “My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m a private investigator, licensed by the state of California. I’m thirty-two years old, twice divorced, no kids.”

Grafton then moves on to the meat of Kinsey’s investigation, in which Kinsey is sometimes assisted by Lieutenant Con Dolan of the Santa Teresa Police Department’s Homicide Division or Lieutenant Jonah Robb, with whom she had an affair. Often, however, she works alone, partly because her job as a private investigator does not require her to follow police procedure. Kinsey is an inveterate snoop who performs a quick search of any room in which she is left alone. Although generally law-abiding, she carries a set of lock picks that she uses to break into rooms, often misrepresents herself, and in “L” Is for Lawless, she steals a maid’s uniform to gain access to a hotel room. Along with the story of the investigation, Grafton usually tells a side story, either a humorous one involving Henry and his siblings or tavern-owner Rosie, or one involving a separate investigation or another character, which she sometimes uses as a red herring. However, Grafton’s mysteries are enjoyable more for their characterization and dialogue rather than as puzzle mysteries to be deciphered by the reader. The killer’s identity is not revealed until Kinsey confronts the suspect, and sometimes she does not know who the murderer is until that person begins to pursue her. This leads to dramatic, violent climaxes that often feature a chase and end with a definitive act such as a shooting. Sometimes the killer ultimately faces justice in a court of law, as in “Q” Is for Quarry (2002), and sometimes the killer faces a swifter form of justice, as in “O” Is for Outlaw, in which the murderer is decapitated by the edge of a bucket of a tractor driven by the brother of one of the victims. Occasionally, as in “I” Is for Innocent, the killer gets away with murder.

Almost every novel ends with an epilogue, written as if Kinsey were submitting a final report, and signed “Respectfully submitted, Kinsey Millhone.” In the epilogue, Grafton explains what happens after the final climactic scene, neatly tidying up any loose ends and bringing emotional closure, as in “O” Is for Outlaw, in which Kinsey describes bidding her former husband Mickey good-bye as he died in the hospital.

“A” Is for Alibi

“A” Is for Alibi, the first novel in the series, is dominated by the theme of betrayal through multiple infidelities and lies. Nikki Fife, who was convicted eight years earlier of poisoning her husband, Laurence, with oleander and has just been released from prison, comes to Kinsey to find out who really killed her husband. The police suspect Nikki of killing Libby Glass, an accountant, who also died by oleander poisoning. Suspects include Gwen, Laurence’s first wife; Charlotte Mercer, a judge’s wife with whom Laurence had an affair; and Libby’s former boyfriend, Lyle Abernathy. Kinsey becomes romantically involved with Charlie Scorsoni, Laurence’s partner, then realizes she has not ruled him out as a suspect. She solves the murders when she looks at them from a different perspective.

“M” Is for Malice

In “M” Is for Malice, the past demonstrates its power to reach out and hurt people. Tasha Howard, an estate lawyer and Kinsey’s cousin, asks Kinsey to find Guy Malek, one of the heirs to the fortune left by Bader Malek. Kinsey finds the former drug addict, who had been missing for eighteen years, living in poverty in a small rural town. Guy has found religion and returns to his ancestral home for what he hopes will be a happy reunion with his brothers Donovan, Bennet, and Jack. However, Guy is found murdered in his bed. The solution to the mystery centers on valuable letters that were stolen, presumably by Guy, and hidden secrets in the family.

“O” Is for Outlaw

“O” Is for Outlaw is the story of multiple betrayals, first of Kinsey by her first husband, Mickey Magruder, a police officer who asks her to lie and has an affair with another woman, and then of Mickey by Kinsey, who does not trust him when he says he did not beat a man and cause his death. A storage space scavenger sells Kinsey a box of personal items that she left with her first husband, and she decides to find out what has happened to him. When Mickey is shot and close to death, Kinsey investigates and finds that Mickey had discovered links between three men in Louisville and Vietnam that may have led to his shooting and comes perilously close to being killed herself.

“S” Is for Silence

In “S” Is for Silence, Kinsey undertakes a cold case when Daisy Sullivan asks her to look into the disappearance thirty-four years earlier of her mother, Violet, then a beautiful, sexy, young woman. It had long been rumored that Violet had run off with a lover or been killed by her husband. Key to the solution of this mystery is Violet’s brand-new Chevrolet Bel Air, which disappeared along with her and which Kinsey helps locate. In this novel, the theme of betrayal is joined by one of abandonment, in particular of seven-year-old Daisy by her mother. Grafton departs from her usual first-person narrative style to alternate sections told by Kinsey with a third-person narrative describing events from a long-gone Fourth of July in the small California town of Serena Station.