S Is for Silence (Kinsey Millhone Series #19) » (Reprint)

Grafton is a writer on a mission: Already two-thirds of the way into her series of alphabetic murder stories starring P. I. Kinsey Millhone, she aims to make it to the end. Millhone, who has her own bio on Grafton's web site, indeed seems to have taken on a life of her own. She is "human-sized," as Grafton says, a simple gal solving complex, irresistible murder cases.

S is for silence: the silence of the lost, the silence of the missing, the silence of oblivion.

Thirty-four years ago, Violet Sullivan put on her party finery and left for the annual Fourth of July fireworks display. She was never seen again.

In the small California town of Serena Station, tongues wagged. Some said she'd run off with a lover. Some said she was murdered by her husband.

But for the not-quite-seven-year-old daughter Daisy she left behind, her absence has never been explained or forgotten.

Now, thirty-four years later, she wants the solace of closure.

In S is for Silence, Kinsey Millhone's nineteenth excursion into the world of suspense and misadventure, S is for surprises as Sue Grafton takes a whole new approach to telling the tale. And S is for superb: Kinsey and Grafton at their best.

The Washington Post - Patrick Anderson

S Is for Silence, the 19th novel in Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone series, is one of her best and also one in which she makes an interesting departure. Grafton tells her story in two ways. The first is the classic private-eye format of the previous novels: Kinsey's first-person account of her search for a woman named Violet Sullivan who vanished 34 years earlier, wherein she reports to us as she questions Violet's husband, lovers and friends about long-ago events. Grafton's innovation is to alternate this account with chapters written in the third person in which she shows Violet interacting with those people, and them interacting with each other, in the days leading up to her disappearance.