In 1979, four boys from an elite private school in the fictional town of Santa Teresa film their sexual assault on a classmate. Not long after, the tape goes missing and the person reported to have stolen it turns up dead. Some of the boys are sentenced to prison time. Ten years later, in 1989, one of the boys, Fritz McCabe, is released from prison. He receives letters threatening to release the tape and send him back to prison, unless he and his parents pay up. McCabe’s parents hire PI Kinsey Millhone to find out who is sending the letters, sending her down a rabbit hole filled with deeply unlikeable rabbits.
I’d never read a Kinsey Millhone book before and since my library (or, specifically, the limited English-language section) had only this one – the last installment; the author sadly died before she was able to write Z – I figured, why not start at the end? It was an okay read, but with a few caveats.
First of all, the novel is way too long. My paperback clocked in at a good 700 pages and quite a bit of that is redundant; it could’ve been half as long and not suffer in any meaningful way. A good editor was needed here; I found myself skimming the last chapters because I was ready to be done with it.
Secondly, while I enjoyed it, it has a bit of a tone problem. Parts of it reminded me of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels; Kinsey has to deal with the shenanigans of her landlord Henry’s temporary guests, one of whom is not called Lula but might as well have been. Cats and dogs are involved. And it’s not that it’s not funny, but the rest of the book is about the rape of a fourteen year old. It reads as if Grafton wasn’t really sure how to tackle the problem; have it be full 1980s the-girl-was-asking-for-it, or take the modern approach? The girl, in question, publicly insists it was all in good fun but seems hurt by it all privately, but it’s never really convincing or uniform. It’s weird. Kinsey herself suffers from the same problem. I can sense there’s an interesting character in there, but she’s oddly robotic here because, again, the author doesn’t really seem to know how to make her respond to certain issues in a way that works for both the past and the present take on these crimes. There’s also a subplot crammed in related to the previous novel, which I hadn’t read and felt zero investment towards. I suspect it was an attempt to tie the novel to the rest of the series, but again it’s tackled with such a lacklustre attitude that I wondered why the author used it at all.
Additionally, the novel feels a bit anachronistic in places, such as when Kinsey thinks to herself that coming out in 1989 isn’t a big deal like it was in 1979. I remember the 1980s well enough to know that coming out and being gay was definitely a big deal.
All of this makes it seem like I didn’t enjoy the novel and that’s not entirely true; there were parts of it that I did enjoy. The central mystery is intriguing enough, particularly because it does boil down to a he-said-she-said, and I liked that all the unlikable high school kids are now unlikable adults. Aspects here did work, and I suspect an author like Laura Lippman could’ve made the most of it here. As it stands, though, it’s a weird hodge-podge of plot points that the author never really seems to want to know what to do with.