Looking solemn, Michael Sutton arrives in Kinsey Millhone's office with a story to tell. When he was six, he says, he wandered into the woods and saw two men digging a hole. They claimed they were pirates, looking for buried treasure. Now, all these years later, the long-forgotten events have come back to him--and he has pieced them together with news reports from the time, becoming convinced that he witnesses the burial of a kidnapped child.
Kinsey has nearly nothing to go on. Sutton doesn't even know where he was that day--and, she soon discovers, he has a history of what might generously be called an active imagination. Despite her doubts, Kinsey sets out to track down the so-called burial site. And what's found there pulls her into a hidden current of deceit stretching back more than twenty years...
"Has this reliable series lost its addictive appeal? Not at all."--Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
"Arresting prose...[a] brilliantly inventive novel."--Richmond Times-Dispatch
"Makes me wish there were more than twenty-six letters at her disposal."--Maureen Corrian, NPR.org
"Her most structurally complex, psychologically potent book to date."--Los Angeles Times
More Praise for Sue Grafton and the Alphabet Series
"I'm going to miss Kinsey Millhone. Ever since the first of Sue Grafton's Alphabet mysteries, A Is For Alibi, came out in 1982, Kinsey has been a good friend and the very model of an independent woman, a gutsy Californian P.I. rocking a traditional man's job...it's Kinsey herself who keeps this series so warm and welcoming. She's smart, she's resourceful, and she's tough enough to be sensitive on the right occasions."--New York Times Book Review
"The consistent quality and skillful innovations in this alphabet series justify all the praise these books have received over the past 35 years."--Wall Street Journal
"A superb storyteller."--Publishers Weekly
"Grafton's endless resourcefulness in varying her pitches in this landmark series, graced by her trademark self-deprecating humor, is one of the seven wonders of the genre."--Kirkus Reviews
"Grafton is a writer of many strengths--crisp characterizations, deft plotting, and eloquent dialogue among them--and she has kept her long-running alphabet mystery series fresh and each new release more welcome than the last."--Louisville Courier-Journal
"[Grafton's] ability to give equal weight to the story of the detective and the detective story sets her apart in the world of crime fiction."--Richmond Times-Dispatch