What's in this book
- Sue Grafton's 2009 Kinsey Millhone novel - twenty-first entry in the alphabet mystery series
- Canonical contemporary American female-detective series; the cold-case entry
- 432 pages of patient cold-case investigation reaching back twenty years
- Series ran from A Is for Alibi (1982) through Y Is for Yesterday (2017); Z was never written
- Judy Kaye audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of the broader Kinsey Millhone alphabet, V. I. Warshawski, and canonical American detective fiction
Buy this book
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U is for Undertow is the alphabet novel where Sue Grafton commits to a structural risk most series writers would not take, with multiple-decade flashbacks running in parallel with the present-day investigation and POV chapters from people Kinsey has never met. The case begins when a young man, now an adult, contacts Kinsey because he believes a recovered memory points to the burial site of a famous local kidnapping case from 1967.
What Grafton does with the structure is the achievement. The 1967 chapters are written with the kind of careful period attention that earned the late alphabet its reputation. The other characters' POVs include the kidnappers themselves, rendered with appropriate moral complication. Kinsey's skepticism about recovered-memory testimony is the case's ethical engine and is handled with the seriousness the subject requires.
Five stars. A risk that pays off. Recommended even to readers who think they know what an alphabet novel is supposed to do.
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