"N IS FOR NOOSE" by Sue Grafton (B)

Sue Grafton has achieved a considerable level of literary success with her alphabetized series of crime novels starring Kinsey Millhone, her peripatetic small town private eye. "N is for Noose" is obviously the 14th in the Millhone series. It will be easy for me to become an unabashed fan of Grafton, as this light and breezy novel is a very enjoyable read. Perfect for the end of the day when I can curl up with a good book and forget about the cares of the world. Yes, pleasantly entertaining and sort of like comfort food for the mind.

The great strength of the Millhone series is that the nature of her capers seems to be so realistic as opposed to the testosterone-charged, highly glamorized male versions by others. Grafton's book involves plodding detective work and a methodical, time-consuming examination of mountains of information in an often fruitless search for that elusive clue. There is nothing glamorous here, and it all comes down to organization, taking notes, and paying attention. Moving forward one step at a time.

It is somewhat intriguing for me to get a feminine outlook into the gumshoe business. No testosterone at all, as Millhone is a petite, twice-divorced thirty-five year old former cop. I found Kinsey's extended descriptions of the makeup applications of the women she met to be somewhat off-putting, but that would only be my male-centric point of view. I know that in the real world women often make excellent private investigators. They are usually able to use their sex to great advantage when it comes to duping the men under their purview. That and the feminine intuition thing which often befuddles us men.

However, in this instance Kinsey's femininity becomes a serious, life-threatening liability. She left her gun at home, so she is more or less helpless throughout the entire case. Millhone is not rough and tough, and she gets beaten up pretty badly at one point. I will have to admit that I found this to be somewhat irritating.

She throws off a mention that she wasn't licensed to carry in this part of the state, which was news to me. Why a PI wouldn't have a statewide carry permit, or, better yet, why a carry license isn't statewide, is a plot point which I found to be rather strange at best and annoying at worst. If Kinsey is licensed to be a PI throughout the state of California, then she should have had a carry permit for the entire locale where she may be called to work.

But another more critical flaw in this book is that Grafton copped a surprise ending to the story by pulling a new rabbit out of the proverbial plot hat. The villain turns out to be someone heretofore thought to be entirely unconnected to the case, for Grafton's every clue and all logic point in other directions.

When an author does this to me, I feel, as I did here, that the foregoing reading was an exercise in futility and that I have been blind-sided by the ending. I do not like to read a novel with the reverse expectation that every deduction has to be thrown out the window with everyone thought to be guilty in the clear. Then it is not so much a story as the author playing mind games and toying with me. It is one thing not to know the villain, but it is entirely another thing altogether to point every clue in the wrong direction.

In this new case Kinsey is hired by Selma Newquist to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of her husband, Tom, who was the head sheriff for Nota Lake. He was found dead from a massive heart attack late one night while at the wheel of his truck out on the highway.

On the face of it, there would not seem to be much to investigate, since Tom was 63 years old and a poster child for what not to do with his health. Nevertheless, Selma still believes that Tom was deeply troubled in the months before he died, and whatever it was that weighed on his mind may have been a contributory factor in his early death. She wants to know what it was that was bothering him so much so that she can have peace of mind.

Kinsey starts her investigation and quickly ascertains that Tom was a great cop, a "straight shooter," and a highly respected member of the community. The same couldn't be said for Selma, who has many more enemies than friends in town. Many feel that Tom should never have married her, and some blame her for his death. And none take kindly to Kinsey being hired by her to examine the circumstances of his death. Nota Lake is famous for having once been the locale to which parolees were sent after they got out of prison, and Millhone soon finds out that the entire town congenitally mistrusts any stranger who comes in to nose around. 1998, Henry Holt and Company, 287 pages.