REVIEW: "J IS FOR JUDGMENT" by SUE GRAFTON
Mac Voorhies at California Fidelity Insurance hires Kinsey Millhone, Private Investigator, to fly to Mexico to find Wendell Jaffe, who has been missing and presumed dead for five years. A retired CFI agent has alerted Mac that he saw Wendell with a female companion at a resort hotel in a dinky little town called Viento Negro. Wendell was declared legally dead by the court recently, and CFI paid $500,000 to his widow on his life insurance policy. Wendell’s body was never found when his boat was found floating off the coast of Baja, California, five years ago.
Kinsey takes a flight to Mexico and checks into the hotel at Viento Negro. On the third day, she spots Wendell sunning by the pool in conversation with an exotic dark-haired woman. She begins her surveillance.
After a careful stakeout, she slings herself, gymnast-style, over a series of third-floor balcony railings and breaks into their room, where she finds passports. She learns the identity of the woman is Renata Huff, and that Wendell Jaffe is traveling under the name of the woman’s deceased husband. Next morning, headlines in the local Mexican paper announce that four criminals who escaped from a California prison have killed a woman and stolen her car, and police believe they have crossed the border at Mexicali. One of the escapees is Wendell's younger son Brian. Kinsey discovers that Wendell and Renata have departed the hotel, and she hurries to the airport to catch up with them.
When she returns to Santa Teresa, she reports her investigation results to Mac at the insurance company, and provides an artist’s rendering to the Santa Teresa Police Department of what Wendell looks like now.
She visits (widow) Dana Jaffe, who refuses to believe her husband is not really dead. Then, she visits Wendell's older son Michael, who’s married with a baby son, and finds Wendell there cradling his grandson Brendan in his arms. When Wendell tries to leave, his car won’t start. Kinsey gives him a ride, but suddenly her car stops running, and someone is firing a gun at them from the shadows. As Kinsey prowls the surrounding area in the dark and searches for the shooter, Wendell runs from the attack and disappears again.
Sue Grafton’s complex plot twists constantly surprise, in extremely well-organized scene sequencing. Kinsey is right up in people’s faces, as usual, dangling theories and truth, laying bare undiscovered hidden motives, and pissing them off. The family dynamic looms large in this tale. Grafton casts a sympathetic eye on children who have been abandoned by a parent and the lifelong stress and emotional disruption that parental abandonment causes. K IS FOR KILLER is dazzling story-telling from Sue Grafton. … Pam Wilder …