Sue Grafton

"Of #1 New York Times-bestselling author Sue Grafton, NPR's Maureen Corrigan said, "Makes me wish there were more than 26 letters." With only two letters left, Grafton's many devoted readers will share that sentiment. X: The number ten. An unknown quantity. A mistake. A cross. A kiss. X: The shortest entry in Webster's Unabridged. Derived from Greek and Latin and commonly found in science, medicine, and religion. The most graphically dramatic letter....

"Private detective Kinsey Millhone feels a bit out of place in any department store's lingerie section, but she's entirely in her element when she puts a stop to a brazen shoplifting spree. For her trouble she nearly gets run over in the parking lot by one of the fleeing thieves—and later learns that the one who didn't get away has been found dead in an apparent suicide. But Audrey Vance's grieving fiance suspects murder and hires Kinsey to investigate...

"Beginning slowly with the day-to-day life of private eye Kinsey Milhone, the story suddenly shifts to Solana Rojas, introducing readers to a chilling sociopath. Rojas is not her birth name. It is an identity she cunningly stole, an identity that gives her access to private caregiving jobs."--Back cover

The wife of a hated divorce lawyer becomes the main suspect in his murder and hires private detective Kinsey Millhone to find the real killer.

Lorna Kepler was beautiful and willful, a loner who couldn't resist flirting with danger. Maybe that's what killed her. The cops suspected homicide, but they could find neither motive nor suspect. The case was gradually shifted to the back burner and became another unsolved file. Only Lorna's mother kept it alive, consumed by the certainty that somebody out there had gotten away with murder. And so Kinsey Millhone is pulled into the netherworld of...

J is for Jaffe: Wendell Jaffe, dead these past five years. Or so it seemed until his former insurance agent spotted him in the bar of a dusty little resort halfway between Cabo San Lucas and La Paz. In truth, the facts about Wendell Jaffe had nothing to do with my family history, but murder is seldom tidy and no one ever said revelations operate in a straight line. It was my investigation into the dead man's past that triggered the inquiry into my...

A collection of stories that reveal Kinsey's origins-- and Grafton's past. The nine stories that open the book show how fully formed Kinsey was from the beginning. The thirteen stories in the second part, written in the decade following her mother's death, feature Kit Blue, a younger version of Grafton herself, and reflect her troubled family life and the author's journey from anger to understanding and forgiveness.

Kinsey Millhone gets in over her head when she becomes involved in an elusive mystery that entangles her in everyone's dirty laundry--literally.

Kinsey Millhone agrees to take over a case left unsolved by her private eye friend when he died and finds that she has to start from square one and defend her life while she is at it.

Eighteen years after the body of an unidentified young woman is discovered in a quarry off California's Highway 1, two police detectives nearing retirement enlist Kinsey Millhone's aid to help identify the long-ago murder victim.