Kinsey Millhone is 32. She starts off by explaining that she’s a private investigator licensed by California, that she’s been divorced twice, and that she recently killed a man. And that first paragraph starts a book and a series that goes on to shine with a power and a brilliance that few other book series can achieve.
But first, the crime.
Nikki Fife has just been released from prison, after serving eight years for killing her husband. Now she’s out, she still claims that she’s innocent, and she wants Kinsey to find out who killed Laurence Fife. A prominent divorce lawyer, he was known as much for his personal dalliances as he was for being a bear in court. Nikki had only been married to him for four years. She had known about his affairs, but she hadn’t cared. It was how she’d met him, actually—she was his mistress when he was still married to his first wife Gwen.
Laurence had been killed with a contaminated allergy pill. Someone had laced one of his pills with oleander, a toxic plant that grows wild in California. Kinsey thinks that the case was pretty straightforward. She had been at Nikki’s trial. Laurence had hired Kinsey a time or two on his divorce cases. But what didn’t come out at the trial is that there was a woman in Los Angeles who had been killed the same way, shorty after Laurence Fife had been.
Libby Glass was young, mid-twenties, working for a business management firm that was putting all of the files for Laurence and his partner Charlie Scorsoni onto computer. Santa Teresa Homicide Detective Con Dolan had suspected that Libby had been having an affair with Laurence, and that was why Nikki killed her too. But he couldn’t prove it. He couldn’t prove a connection between Libby and Laurence, other than her work product, so it was left out of the trial.
But now Kinsey is on the case, and she’s not interested in stopping until she finds out what really happened. Her investigation takes her from Santa Teresa to Los Angeles to Las Vegas, tracking down the family and former boyfriend of Libby Glass, Laurence’s former secretary, and even his ex-wife and her kids, and it ends with Kinsey putting all the pieces together and finding the true killer, and then almost losing her own life in the process.
A Is for Alibi is the first book in the iconic Kinsey Millhone series. I first read this decades ago, when I was in my 20s and figuring out what I liked to read after all those classics I had to read in college. I fell in love with her almost immediately, and I more years than not, I would start the series all over again when the latest letter came out, so this is the Kinsey book I’ve read most often over the years. It’s been many years since I found the time to pull it out and revisit it, so this year I decided to try something new: an audio book.
I listened to A Is for Alibi, narrated by Mary Peiffer, and I loved it. Listening to this book is just good, old-fashioned fun. While some of the book is a little dated now, but hearing this story in Kinsey’s voice, her snark ringing through loud and clear in each moment, is a treat better than a peanut butter and pickle sandwich (seriously, who eats that?!).
But my favorite thing about A Is for Alibi, and all of Sue Grafton’s delicious novels that come after, is how Kinsey meticulously goes through the case, tiny piece by tiny piece, double-checking everything. Sue Grafton leaves the tiniest trail of bread crumbs, and as I’m wondering how all this could possibly come together into a cohesive crime, Kinsey is suddenly gluing all those tiny breadcrumbs together and creating a beautiful mosaic that fits together like magic. I love Kinsey Millhone, I love this series, and getting to listen to it read to me has been a fantastic experience. I definitely recommend this one on audio.
