REVIEW: “U IS FOR UNDERTOW” by SUE GRAFTON
In Sue Grafton’s 21st book in the Kinsey Millhone series, Kinsey is visited by a young man named Michael Sutton, who believes he might have been a witness to a crime when he was six years old. He tells her that he has just seen a newspaper article about the kidnapping of Mary Claire Fitzhugh twenty-one years ago that has regenerated memories that might be pertinent. Sutton believes he watched two men burying her body in a hole off a bridal trail in Horton Ravine on July 21, 1967, which was his sixth birthday. He thought they were pirates, because they wore bandanas wrapped around their heads. He tells Kinsey details of the kidnapping that he remembers, including that the little girl’s father paid the ransom, but the money was not picked up and the child was never seen again. He hires Kinsey for one day to investigate the twenty-year-old kidnapping case, and pays cash.
She begins her search by consulting her trusty reference books and microfilm at the library, and studies construction blueprints of residential homesites in Santa Teresa’s elite Horton Ravine. She quickly identifies the spot where Sutton could have seen the two men burying something in 1967, and alerts her friend, Detective Cheney Phillips of the Santa Teresa Police Department, who organizes a search team to dig up the alleged burial site. There is no child buried there; but what is actually discovered ignites Kinsey’s curiosity, and she continues her investigation beyond the one-day assignment.
Meanwhile, Kinsey’s cousin Tasha in Lompoc sends her a large manila envelope full of old, unopened letters that had been sent from Kinsey’s grandmother Cornelia LaGrand to Kinsey’s Aunt Gin, the woman who raised her. When she gets around to reading them, she realizes that her grandmother had been trying to contact her for decades, but her Aunt Gin, who is now deceased, had returned all the letters, including the first one she opened, in which LaGrand invited little orphaned Kinsey to come to live with her in Lompoc. Though her grandmother’s offer was repeatedly extended for young Kinsey to be part of the larger family, Kinsey now realizes that Aunt Gin was having no part of that invitation, so Kinsey had no knowledge of this for twenty-nine years. She has always believed that her Lompoc relatives had abandoned her after her parents were killed in an automobile accident when she was five. Also in the envelope with the old letters, is a copy of an invoice that reflects payment of a fee to a private investigator hired by her grandmother. This piques her interest. She locates the investigator and questions him about her family.
Sutton’s credibility as a witness becomes questionable and Kinsey is disappointed, because she believes he’s got valid reasons to believe he encountered the kidnappers.
Kinsey continues to investigate possible routes and sites that the kidnappers could have used in 1967, when trying to bury the body of a small child. Because there was a second kidnapping in 1967, in which the child was released after her parents paid the $15,000 ransom, Kinsey believes the two incidents are related. Step by step, she analyzes how the crime could have been committed and by whom, eliminating unworkable theories, until she claps onto the truth. She follows a complicated labyrinth of research and instincts, until she solves the most likely scenario of the two kidnappers’ motives and who they could be. This is the only case in which Kinsey never meets the bad guys until the very end.
Kinsey’s sketchy and painful family history has been woven through several of Grafton’s later books. In U Is for Undertow, now that she’s about to turn thirty-eight, she must reconcile after so many years that she’s been wrong about her grandmother’s intentions and her cousins’ genuine desire for her to be involved in their family. … Pam Wilder …