REVIEW: "Q IS FOR QUARRY" by SUE GRAFTON
A few weeks before her 37th birthday, Kinsey Millhone is unpacking boxes in her new office location, when Lieutenant Con Dolan of the Homicide Department of the Santa Teresa Police Department drops in on her and offers to take her to lunch. He asks her to join him in investigating a Jane Doe case from eighteen years ago, in which a young woman’s body was found dumped in a quarry in Lompoc. Dolan wants to try to identify the victim. He tells her his friend, Stacey Oliphant, who has retired from the Sheriff’s Homicide Department, wants to re-open the case, too. Both of them were investigating officers in the 1969 case. Lieutenant Dolan gives Kinsey the “murder book” to review. After studying the case, she decides to join forces with the two older gents.
The three investigators follow leads from the quarry in Lompoc to rural towns near Blythe in eastern California. As they work together, she realizes that her older colleagues struggle with health issues while doing their jobs with skill and relentless persistence. She deeply appreciates and values their companionship and mutual respect. While the detectives pursue other evidence, she doggedly interviews townsfolk in the small communities involved, until she is able to trace Jane Doe’s schoolmates and dental records and confirm the murder victim’s identity. Once they have identified the murder victim, the two detectives return to Santa Teresa, leaving Kinsey to follow them a few hours later with Lieutenant Dolan’s car.
Her probing questions in the community have disrupted long-undisturbed secrets among close-knit friends and families. Before she leaves town, she contemplates the evidence and interviews, and suddenly pieces together the events that ended Jane Doe’s life. Her suspicions steer her straight into danger, alone with no backup, in the middle of the endless desert night. … Pam Wilder …