[In the following positive review, Lipez describes “L” Is for Lawless as “droll” and “larky.”]

“I don't mean to bitch, but in the future I intend to hesitate before I do a favor for the friend of a friend.” That's the attention-getting opening line of Sue Grafton's droll, larky “L” Is for Lawless, the latest in her Kinsey Millhone P.I. series. This one goes slack, even improbable, now and again, but Millhone is as companionable as ever during a case that takes her from her cozy Southern California digs to some of the least inviting stopovers in the Mid-South and back. Readers might favor, by a hair, an amusingly anti-human corporate hotel near the Dallas-Fort Worth airport to the backroad roach motels Millhone becomes intimate with en route to Louisville. But part of Millhone's crazy charm is that her preference is likely to go the other way, by a hair.

The friend of a friend who asks Millhone for help is a friend of her elderly landlord, Henry Pitts. Millhone is eagerly looking forward to the upcoming wedding of two octogenarian chums, so she's reluctant to take time out to solve the mystery—for no fee—of why the federal government is refusing to pay burial benefits to the family of World War II vet John Lee. He carefully left the impression among his survivors that he was a secret agent for the Allies in Burma, but some of them suspect he was a Japanese spy. The truth is more mundane, with criminal roots dating back to 1941, and much closer to home.

Grafton is characteristically fanciful in “L” Is for Lawless in the way she casts Millhone off, Nancy Drew-like, into the treacherous Middle-American unknown. Grafton's fans can always count on Millhone finding herself suddenly far from home with little to sustain her beyond her wits and the knowledge that she always carries a change of underwear. You see it coming every time and have to laugh. In this one, Millhone follows two shady characters from John Lee's past out to the local airport, and all of a sudden she's hurtling across the continent, astonished at herself but game as ever.

Millhone does make it back to California in time for her old pals’ wedding, but not before riskily encountering additional disturbed characters out of John Lee's distant, problematical past. One of them has a Kentucky mother whom Millhone finds perfectly adorable. She figures that the old lady's nickname, “Hell on Wheels,” is a jokey endearment until granny raises a shotgun at somebody and takes aim through her cataracts.