A Grave Talent (Kate Martinelli Series #1) » (Reprint)

SARAH GRAVES lives with her husband in Eastport, Maine, where her mystery novels are set. She is currently working on her tenth novel in the bestselling Home Repair Is Homicide series.

This gripping debut of the Kate Martinelli mystery series won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery, generating wide critical acclaim and moving Laurie R. King into the upper tier of the genre. As A Grave Talent begins, the unthinkable has happened in a small community outside of San Francisco. A string of shocking murders has occurred, each victim an innocent child. For Detective Kate Martinelli, just promoted to Homicide and paired with a seasoned cop who's less than thrilled to be handed a green partner, it's going to be a difficult case. Then the detectives receive what appears to be a case-breaking lead: it seems that one of the residents of this odd, close-knit colony is Vaun Adams, arguably the century's greatest painter of women, a man, as it turns out, with a sinister secret. For behind the brushes and canvases also stands a notorious felon once convicted of strangling a little girl. What really happened on that day of savage violence eighteen years ago? To bring a murderer to justice, Kate must delve into the artist's dark past—even if she knows it means losing everything she holds dear.

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Inspector Alonzo Hawkin is assigned to coordinate investigations into the strangulation deaths of two Bay Area little girls and the disappearance of another, the daughter of a politically connected family. He is told to take Kate Martinelli as his assistant for PR reasons (it'll look good to the fearful mothers of four counties to have a woman on the case), and indeed, Martinelli is paraded before the press when the third child's body is found dumped, as were the others, in Tyler's Road, where lives a colony of artists and dropouts, each of them fairly isolated from the others. It is almost certain that the child-killer is a resident of the colony, and suspicion falls on a haunting artist with a murder conviction in her past. Well crafted, prickling with excitement, full of intriguing characters, King's debut doesn't disclose that her female detective is lesbian until 180 pages have gone by. After the last 120, readers won't care, for with Kate Martinelli the figure of the lesbian sleuth explodes into the mystery mainstream in a story told well enough to hook and hold Rendell and P. D. James fans.