Y is for Yesterday / Sue Grafton

Sue Grafton is another author I've read since the 1980s, and since her stories take place in that decade and time never advances much, it's always a bit nostalgic traveling back to the time before cellphones, internet, and many of the things that define the intervening decades. This unfortunately is the last visit with detective Kinsey Millhone, since the author of the alphabet series "only" made it to Y before her recent passing.

In Y is for Yesterday Kinsey is hired to find out the identity of a blackmailer who is trying to get a surprisingly paltry sum from a young man recently released from confinement after a tragic murder in high school. The story ping pongs back and forth from 1979 to 1989 and includes as a sidestory a stalker (from a previous episode in the series) who is after Kinsey. The whole book is a bit dark, and the usual lighter vignettes of Rosie's "offal" cooking in the neighborhood Hungarian restaurant and her octogenarian baker-landlord fall to the edges of the story.

This abrupt interruption of the series will preserve that place and time in my mind. I may even revisit some of the earlier episodes, since over thirty years my memory has certainly erased the details of many of the books and they will feel brand new once more. That's the good thing about the series, even now that it's ended-- you can always return to it like an old friend.

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Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

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