REVIEW: "E IS FOR EVIDENCE" by SUE GRAFTON
It’s Dec 27 and Kinsey Millhone, Private Detective, is in her office in Santa Teresa, California, opening her mail. She has just received a receipt from her bank for an after-hours deposit of $5,000 that was made on December 24 and credited to her account. She didn’t make that deposit. She calls the bank to report the error and is told someone will look into it. She is just beginning an investigation assigned to her by California Fidelity Insurance, inspecting fire damage at a warehouse in Colgate belonging to Wood/Warren, a local industrial company that manufactures hydrogen furnaces. Within days, documents in the files given to her by the insurance company disappear, and she is accused by the insurance company of accepting a payoff from Wood/Warren, at the same time that the CEO Lance Wood is accused of arson.
To clear herself, she begins an investigation and discovers that when one of the Wood/Warren engineers died a couple of years ago, the death was preliminarily ruled a suicide. She travels to Dallas to interview his widow, who believes her husband was murdered. As Kinsey delves into this case, she learns that lab samples processed at the time of his death were stolen from the lab, so there was no way for the coroner to provide a final ruling.
Suddenly, her ex-husband Daniel shows up at her door and she’s pissed, because he walked out on her eight years ago without explanation. He wants to store an expensive guitar in her apartment while he’s in town. She agrees to let him stash it there in the corner, but she senses he is up to no good again and remains watchful.
Kinsey has tea with matriarch Helen Wood and her daughters at their enormous, French Baroque-style home. Helen asks Kinsey to work for her to investigate who is framing her son Lance and Kinsey. Reluctantly, Kinsey declines, explaining that she cannot by law be involved with Lance or anyone else at Wood/Warren. She is on her own to uncover who is framing her.
Helen’s daughter Olive and husband Terry Kohler invite Kinsey to a cocktail party on New Year’s Eve. Kinsey offers to help with preparations. A few hours before the party, as Olive and Kinsey enter the house with bags of groceries and a parcel that was lying on the porch, the parcel explodes, charging their lives forever.
Kinsey spends as much time in the hospital as she can stand, then checks herself out to continue her probe.
Darcy at the insurance company alerts Kinsey that she’s going to be charged by the District Attorney as a co-conspirator to Lance’s felony charge of arson and fraud. Kinsey purchases an all-band receiver capable of sniffing out electronic surveillance equipment, and she and Lance walk through his office, where they discover an electronic bug in his baseboard telephone jack. When she arrives home, the scanner alert sounds again, and she discovers that there is a listening device in her home.
Kinsey finds a corpse sitting in a rental car parked in front of her apartment. She believes this is a message directed at her. The Santa Teresa Police Department Forensics team finds a palm print on the hood of the car. The print belongs to an escaped convict. With that clue, Kinsey realizes who has been behind all the murders, and who is framing her and Lance Wood.
Her astute crime-solving comes at a cost. Before the last page of the book, there’s yet another bomb. She will need to enact a dangerous strategic ploy to save her life.
When I began reading this book, I experienced prickly angst at Kinsey’s predicament of being blamed for something she didn’t do, because I could sympathize. Sue Grafton’s brilliant scene-setting pulled me right into this situation and kept me rapidly reading, all the way to the final page of this harrowing story. … Pam Wilder …