Sue Grafton Alphabet series  

A is for Alibi     3 hours     abridged     Judy Kaye  

Plenty of people in the picturesque town of Santa Teresa, California, wanted Laurence Fife, a ruthless divorce attorney, dead.  Including, thought the cops, his young and beautiful wife, who was convicted of the crime.

Now, eight years later and out on parole, Nikki Fife hires Kinsey Millhone to find out who really killer her husband.  Kinsey must pursue a trail that's eight years old: one that leads from a young boy, born deaf, whose memory cannot be trusted; to a lawyer defensively loyal to his dead partner - and disarmingly attractive to Millhone; to a not-so-young secretary with too high a salary for far too few skills.

This train will twist to include them all, with Kinsey following every turn until it finally twists back on itself and she fins herself face-to-face with a killer cunning enough to get away with murder.

B is for Burglar     3 hours     abridged     Judy Kaye  

Beverly Danziger looked like an expensive, carefully wrapped package from a good but conservative shop. Only her compulsive chatter hinted at the nervousness beneath her cool surface. It was a nervousness out of all proportion to the problem she placed before Kinsey Millhone. There was an absent sister. A will to be settled - a matter of only a few thousand dollars. Mrs. Danziger did not look as if she needed a few thousand dollars. And she didn't seem like someone longing for a family reunion. Still, business was slow, and even a private investigator has bills to pay. Millhone took the job. It looked routine.  

Elaine Boldt's wrappings were a good deal flashier than her sisters, but they signaled the same thing: The lady had money. A rich widow in her early forties, she owned a condo in Boca Raton and another in Santa Teresa. According to the manager of the California building, she was last seen draped in her $12,000 lynx coat heading for Boca Raton . According to the manager of the Florida building, she never got there. But someone else had and she was camping out illegally in Mrs. Boldt's apartment. The job was beginning to seem a bit less routine. It turned tricky when Beverly Danziger ordered Millhone to drop the case and it took on an ominous quality when Aubrey Danziger surfaced, making all kinds of wild accusations about his wife. But it only became sinister when Millhone learned that just days before

Elaine Boldt went missing, her next-door neighbor and bridge partner had been murdered and the killer was still at large.  

A house destroyed by arson. A brutally murdered woman. A missing lynx coat. An apartment burgled of valueless papers, another ransacked in a melee of mindless destruction. And more murder. As Millhone digs deeper into the case, she finds herself in a nightmarish hall of mirrors in which reality is distorted by illusion and nothing--except danger--is quite what it seems.  

C is for Corpse     7.75 hours     unabridged     Mary Peiffer   Audible

He was young -- maybe twenty or so -- and he must once have been a good-looking kid. Kinsey could see that. But now his body was covered in scars, his face half-collapsed. It saddened Kinsey and made her curious. She could see he was in a lot of pain. But for three weeks, as Kinsey'd watched him doggedly working out at the local gym, putting himself through a grueling exercise routine, he never spoke.  

Then one Monday morning when there was no one else in the gym, Bobby Callahan approached her. His story was hard to credit: a murderous assault by a tailgating car on a lonely rural road, a roadside smash into a canyon 400 feet below, his Porsche a bare ruin, his best friend dead. The doctors had managed to put his body back together again -- sort of. His mother's money had seen to that. What they couldn't fix was his mind, couldn't restore the huge chunks of memory wiped out by the crash. Bobby knew someone had tried to kill him, but he didn't know why. He knew he had the key to something that made him dangerous to the killer, but he didn't know what it was. And he sensed that someone was still out there, ready to pounce at the first sign his memory was coming back. He'd been to the cops, but they 'd shrugged off his story. His family thought he had a screw loose. But he was scared -- scared to death. He wanted to hire Kinsey.  

His case didn't have a whole lot going for it, but he was hard to resist: young, brave, hurt. She took him on. And three days later, Bobby Callahan was dead.  

Kinsey Millhone never welshed on a deal. She'd been hired to stop a killing. Now she'd find the killer.  

D is for Deadbeat     6.5 hours     unabridged     Mary Peiffer   Audible  

He called himself Alvin Limardo, and the job he had for Kinsey was cut-and-dried: locate a kid who'd done him a favor and pass on a check for $25,000. It was only later, after he'd stiffed her for her retainer, that Kinsey found out his name was Daggett. John Daggett. Ex-con. Inveterate liar. Chronic drunk. And dead. The cops called it an accident -- death by drowning. Kinsey wasn't so sure.  

Pulled into the detritus of a dead man's life, Kinsey soon realizes that Daggett had an awful lot of enemies. There's the daughter who grew up with a cheating drunk for a father, and the wife who's become a religious nut in response to an intolerable marriage. There's the lady who thought she was Mrs. Daggett -- and has the bruises to prove it only to discover the legal Mrs. D. And there are the drug dealers out $25,000. But most of all, there are the families of the five people John Daggett killed, victims of his wild, drunken driving. The D.A. called it vehicular manslaughter and put him away for two years. The families called it murder and had very good reason to want John Daggett dead.  

Deft, cunning, and clever, this latest Millhone mystery also confronts some messy truths, for, as Kinsey herself says, "Some debts of the human soul are so enormous only life itself is sufficient forfeit" -- but as she'd be the first to admit, murder is not a socially acceptable solution.  

F is for Fugitive     3 hours     abridged     Judy Kaye  

Floral Beach wasn't much of a town: six streets long and three deep, its only notable feature a strip of sand fronting the Pacific. It was on that sandy beach seventeen years ago that the strangled body of Jean Timberlake had been found.  

The people of Floral Beach didn't pay a whole lot of mind to past history, especially when Bailey Fowler, the self-confessed killer, had been properly processed and convicted. They weren't even unduly concerned when, a year after the murder, Fowler walked away from the men's prison at San Luis Obispo, never to be seen again. After all, everyone knew Jean had been a wild kid. "Like mother, like daughter," some said--though never within hearing of Shana Timberlake, who, whatever her faults, still mourned her murdered child.  

And then, by sheer fluke, the cops stumbled on Bailey Fowler. And a case seventeen years dead came murderously to life again.  

G is for Gumshoe     8.5 hours     unabridged     Judy Kaye     Audible

It's the fifth of May and Kinsey is celebrating her 33rd birthday. One of her presents is a call from a fellow detective warning her that she's made the hit list of Tyrone Patty (a killer she helped track down) and suggesting she hire a bodyguard. But Kinsey has better things to do with her money. Instead, she takes on her next case -- tracking down her new client's eccentric mother who is missing from her trailer home on the edge of the Mojave Desert. But before she can get very far in the case, Kinsey is run off the road by a red pickup truck, wrecking her '68 Volkswagen and landing herself in the hospital.  

Maybe a bodyguard is a good idea after all . . . Enter Robert Dietz, a burnt-out detective, "late forties, five ten, maybe 170, [who arrives in] jeans, cowboy boots, a tweed sport coat with a blue toothbrush protruding from the breast pocket like a ballpoint pen."

I is Innocent     3 hours     abridged     Judy Kaye     CD 

Lonnie Kingman is in a bind. He's smack in the middle of assembling a civil suit, and the private investigator who was doing his pretrial legwork has just dropped dead of a heart attack. In a matter of weeks the court's statute of limitations will put paid to his case. Five years ago David Barney walked when a jury acquitted him of the murder of his rich wife, Isabelle. Now Kingman, acting as attorney for the dead woman's ex-husband and their child (and sure that the jury made a serious mistake), is trying to divest David Barney of the profits of that murder. But time is running out, and David Barney still swears he's innocent.

Patterned along the lines of a legal case, "I" Is for Innocent is seamlessly divided into thirds: one-third of the novel is devoted to the prosecution, one-third to the defense, and a final third to cross-examination and rebuttal. The result is a trial novel without a trial and a crime novel that resists solution right to the end.  

When Kinsey Millhone agrees to take over Morley Shine's investigation, she thinks it is a simple matter of tying up the loose ends. Morley might have been careless about his health, but he was an old pro at the business. So it comes as a real shock when she finds his files in disarray, his key informant less than credible, and his witnesses denying ever having spoken with him. It comes as a bigger shock when she finds that every claim David Barney has made checks out. But if Barney didn't murder his wife, who did? It would seem the list of candidates is a long one. In life, Isabelle Barney had stepped on a lot of toes.  

L is for Lawless     3 hours     abridged     Judy Kaye

Kinsey agrees to do a favor for a friend of a friend and gets herself into so much trouble that she promises at the outset never to do such a thing again without careful consideration.

Henry Pitt, her longtime landlord asks her to help a fellow neighbor find evidence that his grandfather served in the military during the Second World War. With such proof, the man can be decently buried, courtesy of the U.S. government. It seems such a simple thing, but with Kinsey, it rarely is. Before long she finds herself entangled with an eccentric and quarrelsome family as well as a long lost buddy who has turned up just in time to get himself beaten up in a robbery attempt of the alleged veteran's apartment. It seems there is a reason the Armed Services have no record of the dead man's service. Kinsey sets out to determine what he might have been doing instead of fighting against the Japanese and why someone might think his shabby apartment worth a burgle.  

M is for Malice     4 hours     abridged     Judy Kaye  

"M" is for money. Lots of it. "M" is for Malek Construction, the $40 million company that grew out of modest soil to become one of the big three in California construction, one of the few still in family hands.  

"M" is for the Malek family: four sons now nearing middle age who stand to inherit a fortune--four men with very different outlooks, temperaments, and needs, linked only by blood and money. Eighteen years ago, one of them--angry, troubled, and in trouble--went missing.  

"M" is for Millhone, hired to trace that missing black sheep brother.  

"M" is for memories, none of them happy. The bitter memories of an embattled family. This prodigal son will find no welcome at his family's table. "M" is for malice.  

And in brutal consequence, "M" is for murder, the all-too-common outcome of familial hatreds.  

"M" is for malice ... and malice kills.

N is for Noose     4 hours     abridged     Judy Kaye  

Kinsey Millhone should have done something else--she should have turned the car in the direction of home. Instead, she was about to put herself in the gravest jeopardy of her career.

Tom Newquist had been a detective in the Nota Lake sheriff's office--a tough, honest cop respected by everyone. When he died suddenly, the townsfolk were saddened but not surprised: Just shy of sixty-five, Newquist worked too hard, smoked too much, and exercised too little. That plus an appetite for junk food made him a poster boy for an American Heart Association campaign.  

Newquist's widow didn't doubt the coroner's report. But what Selma couldn't accept was not knowing what had so bothered Tom in the last six weeks of his life. What was it that had made him prowl restlessly at night, that had him brooding constantly? Selma Newquist wanted closure, and the only way she'd get it was if she found out what it was that had so bedeviled her husband.

Kinsey should have dumped the case. It was vague and hopeless, like looking for a needle in a haystack. Instead, she set up shop in Nota Lake , where she found that looking for a needle in a haystack can draw blood. Very likely, her own.    

O is for Outlaw     10.5 hours     unabridged     Judy Kaye

The call comes on a Monday morning from a guy who scavenges defaulted storage units at auction. The weekend before, he'd bought a stack of cardboard boxes. In one, there was a collection of childhood memorabilia with Kinsey's name all over it. For thirty bucks, he was offering Kinsey the lot.

Though she's never been one for personal possessions, curiosity is a powerful force. She agrees to meet the guy, then hands over a twenty (she may be curious, but she's also cheap and she loves a bargain).  

What she finds among the items is an old undelivered letter to her that will force her to reexamine her beliefs about the breakup of her first marriage ... about the honor of her first husband ... and about an old unsolved murder.  

It will put her life in the gravest peril.

P is for Peril     6 hours     abridged     Judy Kaye  

Dr. Dowan Purcell had been missing for nine weeks when Kinsey got a call asking her to take on the case. A specialist in geriatric medicine, Purcell was a prominent member of the Santa Theresa medical community, and the police had done a thorough job. Purcell had no known enemies and seemed content with his life. At the time of his disappearance, he was running a nursing care facility where both the staff and the patients loved him. He adored his second wife, Crystal , and doted on their two-year-old son.

It wasn’t Crystal who called Kinsey. It was Purcell’s ex-wife, Fiona. Everything about their meeting made Kinsey uneasy. Fiona’s manner was high-handed and her expectations unrealistic. Kinsey’s instincts told her to refuse the job, yet she ended up saying, “I’ll do what I can, but I make no promises.”

It was a decision she’d live to regret.

Pursuing the mysterious disappearance of Purcell, Kinsey crashes into a wall of speculation. It seems everyone has a theory. The cops think he went on a bender and is too ashamed to come home. Fiona is sure he ran off to get away from Crystal , and Crystal is just as sure he’s dead. The staff at the nursing home is convinced he’s been kidnapped, and one of his daughters, having consulted a psychic, is certain that he’s trapped in a dark place, though she doesn’t know where. Kinsey is awash in explanations and sorely lacking in facts. Then pure chance leads her in another direction, and she soon finds herself in a dangerous shadow land, where duplicity and double-dealing are the reality and, with the truth glinting elusively out of reach, she must stake her life on a thin thread of intuition.

Q is for Quarry     13 hours    unabridged     Judy Kaye  

S is for Silence     12 hours    unabridged     Judy Kaye