Bent Northrop Memorial Library

Finding wealthy Elaine Boldt seems like a quickie case to Kinsey Millhone. But Kinsey's case goes from puzzling to sinister, after her bridge partner is found dead.

Fearing that the assailant who had once tried to kill him--and had left him badly scarred and partially amnesiac--would again try to murder him, Bobby Callahan turns to Kinsey Millhone for help.

Kinsey Millhone's grit is tested as she unearths the gruesome truth about a long-buried betrayal and, in the process, comes face-to-face with the grisly fact of her own mortality.

Kinsey Millhone's newest client, Michael Sutton, claims he has recently remembered a long-repressed event in his childhood that could unlock a twenty-year-old mystery; but as Kinsey tries to help Michael find the scene of a crime he witnessed, she begins to wonder if her client is telling her the whole truth.

It was the silly season and a Monday at that, and Kinsey Millhone was bogged down in a preliminary report on a fire claim. Something was nagging at her, but she couldn't pin it. The last thing she needed in the morning mail was a letter from her bank recording an erroneous $5,000 deposit in her account. Kinsey had never believed in Santa Claus and she wasn't about to change her mind now. Resigning herself to a morning of frustration, she phoned the...

The 11th adventure of Santa Teresa, Calif., PI Kinsey Milhone has a dark tone--due in great part to Kinsey's working this case mostly at night. Kinsey agrees to look into the 10-month-old death of Lorna Kepler, a young woman whose decomposed body was discovered in her cabin so long after death that it was impossible to determine the cause. Kinsey's client, Lorna's mother, who works the night shift in a 24-hour diner, suspects murder. So does Kinsey,...

"The darkest and most disturbing case report from the files of Kinsey Millhone, Y is for Yesterday begins in 1979, when four teenage boys from an elite private school sexually assault a fourteen-year-old classmate--and film the attack. Not long after, the tape goes missing and the suspected thief, a fellow classmate, is murdered. In the investigation that follows, one boy turns state's evidence and two of his peers are convicted. But the ringleader...

I was winding my way through the mountains in a cut rate rental car, heading south on 395 toward the town of Nota Lake, California, where I was going to interview a potential client. The client's business was unremarkable, at least as far as I could see. I had no idea there was any jeopardy waiting or I'd have done something else.