[In the following review, Weber argues that “O” Is for Outlaw is “weaker than Grafton's usual fare.”]

All the world's the same, only parts of it are different; and one of the world's most different parts is Southern California, which features so largely in Sue Grafton's alphabet series. Fifteenth of that ilk, O Is for Outlaw demonstrates that, for PIs as for venison, ripeness is all. The gossamer-tough figure of Kinsey Millhone gets better every time: and the distance between L.A. and Kinsey's home base in Santa Barbara—sorry Santa Teresa—seems to shrink as the intrepid investigator mounts her VW bug at the drop of a cellular phone to dash into action.

Outlaw begins with a nudge to aficionados of exercise machines that Kinsey patronizes and continues with recall of a long-lost husband (Southern California is littered with them) whose memory resurfaces just ahead of his street-shot corpse. Is Kinsey being set up—to what end and by whom? Dredging past shallows for some answers, the chirpy heroine also stirs the mud of other people's lives, uncovers unanticipated criminal activities, consumes quantities of junk food, solves serious fashion dilemmas like what to wear at a Montecito cocktail party and makes a strong case that investigation is research spiced with guile and crowned by luck.

Kinsey points out that pro bono means “for boneheads.” Since that is her chief self-assigned task here, Outlaw is weaker than Grafton's usual fare because Millhone is her own client and we care little for the object of her quest. But the chatter is as bright, the descriptions as colorful as we have come to expect, the menaces comfortingly benign and the ending satisfyingly brief and bloody.