Description:

Review

"Exceptionally entertaining…an offbeat sense of humor and a feisty sense of justice."
--_San Francisco__ Chronicle_

"Millhone is an engaging detective-for-hire…P.I. Kinsey Millhone and her creator…are arguably the best of [the] distaff invaders of the hitherto sacrosanct turf of gumshoes."
--_The Buffalo News_

"Once a fan reads one of Grafton's alphabetically titled detective novels, he or she will not rest until all the others are found."--_Los Angeles__ Herald Examiner_
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"Millhone is a refreshingly strong and resourceful female private eye."--_Library Journal_

"Tough but compassionate…There is no one better than Kinsey Millhone."--_Best Sellers_

"A woman we feel we know, a tough cookie with a soft center, a gregarious loner."--_Newsweek_

"Lord, how I like this Kinsey Millhone…The best detective fiction I have read in years."--_The New York Times Book Review_

"Smart, tough, and thorough…Kinsey Millhone is a pleasure."--_The Bloomsbury Review_

"Kinsey is one of the most persuasive of the new female operatives…She's refreshingly free of gender clichés. Grafton, who is a very witty writer, has also given her sleuth a nice sense of humor--and a set of Wonder Woman sheets to prove it."--_Boston__ Herald_

"What grandpa used to call a class act."--Stanley Ellin

"Smart, sexual, likable and a very modern operator."--Dorothy Salisbury Davis

"Kinsey's got brains and a sense of humor."--_Kirkus Reviews_

Product Description

Floral Beach wasn't much of a town: six streets long and three deep, its only notable feature a strip of sand fronting the Pacific. It was on that sandy beach seventeen years ago that the strangled body of Jean Timberlake had been found.

The people of floral Beach didn't pay a whole lot of mind to past history, especially when Bailey Fowler, the self-confessed killer, had been properly processed and convicted. They weren't even unduly concerned when, a year after the murder, Fowler walked away from the men's prison at San Luis Obispo, never to be seen again. After all, everyone knew Jean had been a wild kid. "Like mother, like daughter," some said--though never within hearing of Shana Timberlake, who, whatever her faults, still mourned her murdered child.

And then, by sheer fluke, the cops stumbled on Bailey Fowler. And a case seventeen years dead came murderously to life again.

For Royce Fowler, old and sick with not much time left, his son's reappearance was the chance to heal an old wound. For Kinsey Millhone, the case was a long shot, but she agreed to take it on. She couldn't know then it would lead her to probe the passions buried just below the surface of family relations, where old wounds fester and the most cherished emotions become warped until they fuse into deadly, soul-destroying time bombs.