"Q IS FOR QUARRY" by Sue Grafton (B+)

Once again private eye Kinsey Millhone travels hither, thither, and yon to many of the one stop towns throughout the boondocks of California, this time in a search for clues to an unsolved homicide that has become a very cold case. In 1969 the body of a teenaged girl was found wrapped in a tarp and dumped in a quarry near Lompoc. She was never identified and the lead detective, now in poor health due to cancer, enlists Kinsey's aid in the identification of the Jane Doe before he passes away.

Like many authors both for television and literature, the impetus for this 2002 book came from an actual case that Grafton heard about at a dinner party. The real murder also took place in 1969, but at a different crime scene near Santa Barbara. Unlike this fictional effort, that case has remained unsolved. At the end of this book, Grafton kindly offers a description of the case along with pictures of the Jane Doe as created by a forensic pathologist in an effort to aid in her identification.

Much remains here for fans of Kinsey Millhone. Still divorced, she prefers to live alone so that the few men in her life always end up moving on. She runs to keep in shape and to fight off the effects of aging on her betwixt and between 35 to 40 year old body. The sprightly octogenarian Henry is still her beloved landlord, only now he has just returned from a cruise with new female fans chasing after him. The only small change is her move to new, rather nondescript offices, which turn out to be much in need of decoration.

Everything is as it should be in Santa Teresa, but elsewhere a new case looms when long time friend Lieutenant Con Dolan invites her to lunch and suggests that she read his voluminous files about an unsolved murder that had occurred 16 years before. Dolan had provided backup, but retired police detective Stacey Oliphant was the lead detective on the case. The victim, a young teenaged girl, was never identified, nor was her killer ever brought to justice. Now in the twilight of his years, Oliphant remains haunted by this unsolved case as he still believes that some valuable clues were missed during the investigation. Both he and Lieutenant Dolan want Kinsey to help them look into it.

A pleasing development in this story is that we do get considerable insight into Kinsey's past since the murder scene happens to be at Grayson's Quarry located on property owned by Miz LeGrand Kinsey. Miz LeGrand is her very wealthy maternal grandmother. Not that this will do Kinsey any good, since she is estranged from the family. It turns out that her mother, Rita Cynthia Kinsey, had eloped with Randy Millhone, a man who was not considered to be a suitable candidate. The family cut them off from all further contact and lived as if they didn't exist.

The romance of her parent's elopement did make them more appealing to the younger set, so when Miz LeGrand was not around her mother and her dad occasionally brought her back to the mansion on surreptitious visits while she was a very young child. It was on one such visit that both of her parents were killed in an automobile accident.

Always resentful of being ostracized by her grandmother, Kinsey has ever since had a very prickly relationship with the few cousins of her own age like attorney Tasha Howard who still try to keep in touch. She finds visits to the crime scene to be emotionally wrenching, now all the more amplified because the caretaker, Arne Johnson, has recognized her for her strong resemblance to the other members of the family. He wastes no time in notifying Tasha Howard.

A great pleasure in this Kinsey outing is in the backup support provided by Con Dolan and Stacey Oliphant. Dolan's constant smoking and other bad habits make him a candidate for the same cancerous problems that plague Oliphant. The two men are a hoot as each plays off the other with less than respectful banter. Stacey was so near death that he sold all of his possessions, didn't renew his apartment lease, and let his driver's license expire. Now out with a new lease on life, he finds that he has to start from scratch with even the most mundane of items. Looking death fearlessly in the face, he delves into junk food as if it were haute cuisine.

I loved these two and I enjoyed reading about Kinsey's background. The story itself is interesting to a point, but Grafton has a writing style that is oddly disaffecting. She provides excessive descriptions about clothing, areas, and features of importance to the story. For example, a woman will be described in minute detail as to her dress and makeup, and yet all of that descriptive detail does not create much of a mental image. I have read authors who convey a complete scene, a full mental image, in one sentence, while Grafton takes an entire paragraph to describe the picture of a person that leaves me left with more or less of a blank visual slate. She should learn that less is more and assume that the reader has enough intelligence to fill in the spaces. That being said, this is a still a very pleasant read. 2002, G. Putnam's Sons, 380 pages.