REVIEW: “P IS FOR PERIL” by SUE GRAFTON
In “P Is For Peril,” Kinsey Millhone needs new office space. She finds a suitable small office for lease in an old, restored house close to the building where she’s been leasing an office from attorney Lonnie Kingman. When she signs the lease, she learns that her landlords, brothers Tommy and Richard Hevener, are new in town. She will eventually regret not having run background checks on them.
As Kinsey packs up her office contents and prepares to move, Fiona Purcell, the ex-wife of a Santa Teresa physician, contacts Kinsey and hires her to locate her ex-husband, Dr. Dowan Purcell, who has been missing for nine weeks. Kinsey begins the search with feelings of mistrust and dislike of her new client; nonetheless, she dutifully traces the habits, appointments, and encounters of Dr. Purcell during the last weeks before his disappearance.
Kinsey visits Pacific Meadows, the nursing home where Dr. Purcell is Medical Director. She inspects the premises. During interviews with administrative staff, she discovers that a federal investigation is being conducted at the facility by the Office of the Inspector General, regarding questionable and fraudulent billing practices involving Medicare.
Her landlord Henry tells her he is working project for his sister-in-law Rosie, whose elderly sister Klotilde has passed away. Rosie has given him a shopping bag full of Medicare statements that represent thousands of dollars of inexplicable medical bills and payments to Pacific Meadows, the nursing home where Klotilde was receiving care. As Henry sorts through the bills and statements, he realizes that Pacific Meadows was overbilling and charging for non-existent services for Klotilde before she died, and even after she died. He shares his discovery with Kinsey.
In this story, for the first time she and Henry, who always get along so well together, engage in a heated argument over Kinsey’s taking unnecessary risks. They must work out their differing points of view as they are swept along by treacherous events.
In the end, notes she collects on her trusty index cards reveal crimes committed by characters she meets in the course of her investigation. Though the investigation has taken off in several disconnected directions, Kinsey wrests all the facts into a logical conclusion that could explain the disappearance of Dr. Purcell; but not until the Hevener Brothers thrust her into life-threatening jeopardy and peril … Pam Wilder …