REVIEW: “T IS FOR TRESPASS” by SUE GRAFTON
In the book T Is for Trespass, author Sue Grafton steers Kinsey Millhone into an accidental discovery of elder abuse while she’s investigating other matters for clients. The story begins with Kinsey laboring away at her humdrum day-to-day investigations, running thither and yon; trying to serve legal documents on people; interviewing accident victims, including a married couple suing for damages in an auto accident; and searching for the only eyewitness to the accident.
In addition to her time-consuming daily tasks for clients, her neighbor Gus Vronsky’s niece Melanie hires her to perform a cursory background check on an LVN named Solana Rojas, whom Melanie has interviewed for a position taking care of her elderly uncle. Kinsey follows the usual method of background checks and reports to Melanie that Solana Rojas has a suitable employment record, unaware that Solana Rojas is not her real name. Melanie employs Rojas in her uncle’s home, at which point, Kinsey offers the reader her premonitory thoughts: “What I had no way of knowing was that I’d just, unwittingly, put a noose around Gus Vronsky’s neck.”
Immediately, Rojas begins a routine of drugging Gus during the day so he will sleep all the time. She rents a dumpster bin to be parked at the curb in front of the house and starts the process of discarding Gus’s household “junk,” which disguises her activities of stealing his valuables. She begins selling off the old man’s antique furniture items. One by one, she hauls away valuable oil paintings and tries to sell them at galleries. One horrific scenario after another is perpetrated by the nurse known as Solana Rojas. The list of abuses grows throughout the story, and the danger to Gus, as well as to Kinsey, mounts rapidly.
The lack of cooperation from incompetent social workers leaves Kinsey without a Social Services advocate to support her evidence and discoveries. When illegal trespass becomes the only remedy to remove her elderly neighbor from the abusive situation in his home, Kinsey must make ridiculously complicated choices, weighing whether her own unlawful conduct justifies the result. Then, Kinsey lands in one of the most dangerous situations of the entire Grafton series.
Chapters shift point of view between Solana Rojas’s plans and strategies and Kinsey’s extended investigation of her, as Rojas stays at least one step ahead. Every detail in this story is vivid and unnerving. Though it was hard to read at times because of the alarming subject matter of elder abuse, the story was engaging, absorbing, and full of suspense from start to finish. … Pam Wilder …