[In the following review, Lipez compliments the grit and humor of “J” Is for Judgment.]

Crime is never funny to the people it happens to—or, if it's murder, to their grieving survivors—so being funny in crime fiction takes a special knack. By coincidence, four mystery writers who inject wit into their stories about sordid criminality—and get away with it, wonderfully in three cases, barely in one—have new novels out this month.

Southern California P.I. Kinsey Millhone, of Sue Grafton's popular “alphabet” series, is a brainy, mildly neurotic, good humored woman in a treacherous business. There's a believability to Millhone that comes from the way she kids her own insecurities even as she struggles with them, sometimes prevailing, sometimes not. She has a nice way, too, of drolly appraising the characters she meets in her work without ever trivializing people's suffering, or their crimes. She knows what's important.

In “J” Is for Judgment Millhone is hired by California Fidelity to check out an apparent insurance scam. Wendell Jaffe, presumed dead at sea, is spotted in a resort hotel down in Baja. Supposedly, he committed suicide by jumping off his yacht five years earlier after his multi-million-dollar Ponzi scheme collapsed, ruining dozens of investors. But his widow Dana has just been paid off big by California Fidelity, and then there's the question of where all the investors’ millions went.

Millhone is conventionally competent in the way she uses real investigator's techniques—trading dope with police contacts (including a couple of ex-lovers), following paper trails, enduring wearisome stakeouts. But she'll try Nancy Drew-style sneaking around too, and some of this is delightfully farcical. After spotting Jaffe and a female companion down in Viento Negro (“Black Sand”), Millhone is nearly caught searching his hotel room. She escapes by the skin of her teeth onto an adjoining balcony, where she's suddenly confronted by an elderly drunk smoking a cigarette. Thinking fast, not wanting to cause a ruckus and alert Jaffe, she blurts out, “Hi, stud. How are you? You're lookin’ good tonight.” And so on. It's even funnier when this poor schmo later turns up, all too plausibly, back in California.

One of the saddest characters here is Dana Jaffe. She was once a stylish woman of restless leisure, whose world dropped from under her when her husband disappeared. Instantly penniless, she was forced to make a career planning fancy weddings while she raised two teenaged sons. One of them is now wanted for murder and the other is a dweeby ne'er-do-well married to a whiny teen mother whose chief interest in life, a little ahead even of her infant son, is day-time TV talk shows.

Millhone is stymied in various ways by the Jaffes. The family's such a mess it's hard to sort out. Although Millhone does envy Dana Jaffe in one respect. Dana Jaffe's outfit of “tight, faded jeans and a plain white T-shirt, tennis shoes without socks” had “a careless elegance” on her. Says Millhone, “When I wear the same outfit, it looks like I'm all set to change the oil in my car.”

“J” Is for Judgment is not only about the Jaffe's lemon of a family, but Millhone's too. During the course of her investigation Millhone discovers she has relatives she didn't know she had. Orphaned at age 5 and raised by an aunt, now long dead, Millhone isn't sure she wants to meet the grandmother who, it develops, rejected Millhone's mother at a critical turn in her life. Anyway, she muses, “I never had a family. What would I do with one?” Her choices are tough, and Millhone's profession hasn't left her with the rosiest of pictures of family life. She pushes on, though, with grit and humor, expertly—and entertainingly—answering California Fidelity's questions, if not all of her own.