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V is for Vengeance opens with Kinsey making a citizen's arrest in a Santa Teresa department store and ends in a Las Vegas hotel room with a much wider organized-shoplifting case than she had bargained for. The book introduces a banker's wife named Nora Vogelsang whose perspective takes up a significant portion of the chapters and who is one of Sue Grafton's more interesting late-series creations.
What lifts the book above its parts is the way Grafton handles the small-town California criminal economy. The fences, the runners, the bookkeeping side of the operation, are rendered with the kind of insider attention that I assume came from research and that I suspect came from genuine reporting.
The case resolves cleanly. Kinsey's ongoing personal life continues to evolve. Four stars. Strong late-alphabet Grafton.
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