It’s a couple of days before Christmas, and private investigator Kinsey Millhone is ready to party. And by party, she means go home, snuggle under her quilt and read her new Len Deighton novel. Her landlord Henry is going to visit family for a couple of weeks, and even her local bar is closing down for the holidays. Kinsey will have a chance to rest and recharge, which she needs after the year she’s had.
But life has other plans for her.
Two days before Christmas, the day she’s going to drive Henry to the airport, Darcy brings a file to her office. Darcy is the receptionist for California Fidelity, the insurance company that gives Kinsey office space in return for occasional investigations into claims. This file is a warehouse fire hat had happened a week or two prior, and California Fidelity was wanting to get the claim wrapped up in a hurry. Kinsey looked at the file and recognized the name of the company, Wood/Warren, since she went to school with one of the Wood daughters.
Kinsey finds herself spending Christmas Eve investigating the burned-out warehouse and trying to interview the company president. Instead, she gets pulled into the company Christmas party for a drink and a cookie or two. After a quiet Christmas, Kinsey gets back to work to write up her report on the warehouse. There’s something bothering her about the whole situation, but she can’t put her finger on it. And irritating her further is the fact that her bank mailed her a deposit receipt for $5000. She didn’t deposit $5000. She doesn’t have $5000, and she has no idea where that came from. And now she has to call the bank and chase it down, which she really does not want to do.
It’s not until later, sitting in Mac’s office, the CFI vice-president, that things start to fall into place. He’s looking over Kinsey’s initial report, and he’s not impressed. He asks why she didn’t mention the note on the folder about it probably being arson. Or the fire department report that said the same. Or the newspaper article. She looks at the reports he has in the file and realizes that they’re not the same ones she had been given with the folder. And there had been no note on the front. And when Mac says that he got a call saying she was on the take, the penny drops for her. Or, the $5000 cash deposit drops, and Kinsey realizes that she is being set up.
Anyone who knows Kinsey knows that she will not be okay letting someone else clear this up. She packs up her office but starts working on the case almost immediately. For once, she is her own client, so she’s not bound by the same rules she would be working for someone else. Instead, this is war.
She reacquaints herself with the Wood family, staring with her old school friend Ashley and moves through the rest of the family to try to figure out what is going on. But when someone drops a bomb on Kinsey and the Woods, Kinsey knows that she has to figure this out fast or it’s not just her career that will be ending.
E Is for Evidence is the fifth book in Sue Grafton’s brilliant Kinsey Millhone, and it’s one that pushes Kinsey far beyond her comfort zone. After four books where she solves crimes and occasionally gets shot at, in this one, she feels genuinely vulnerable. The Christmas season brings up that human desire to connect with family and friends, but all of those closets to Kinsey find themselves elsewhere for the holidays. So when her past comes back to knock on her door, she is feeling lonely and unprepared when she opens the door.
I first found Sue Grafton back in the ‘90s, and I would get so excited for a new book that I would often go back and re-read everything beforehand just to get a running start. So I have no idea how many times I have read this book. I just know that it is still not enough. I love this one, where we finally get a glimpse of what Kinsey was like before this alphabet started, through the lens of a former important relationship. I love these novels where we meet someone from her past, and while there are some very difficult moments in E, I still love it.
I listened to E Is for Evidence in two days and I was so sorry that I came to the end so quickly. It’s narrated by Mary Peiffer, and I think she does a fantastic job with these novels. This is the fifth one I’ve listened to, and Peiffer has become the ultimate voice of Kinsey to me now. She gets Kinsey, and that comes across in each minute of the audio book, and I am here for all of it.
If you are someone who has never read a Kinsey Millhone mystery, then I would say that this is not the one to start with. You don’t have to go back to A and go through the whole alphabet in order, but I think E, especially, is for readers who already have a relationship with Kinsey. But once you get to know her a little, come back. There are a lot of classic Kinsey moments here, and you get to discover a whole new level of her history.
