Rating: 6/10
- Plot: A woman released after eight years in prison for poisoning her husband hires Kinsey Millhone to find the real killer.
- Clues: Reasonable, traced through old files and interviews.
- Reveal: The culprit is not hard to guess, and the ending is abrupt.
- Science bonus: The case turns on toxicology: how oleander poisoning works and how the fatal dose could have been delivered.
Kinsey Millhone is thirty-two, twice divorced, and a private investigator in Santa Teresa, California. Nikki Fife, who spent eight years in prison for poisoning her lawyer husband with oleander, hires Kinsey to find out who really killed him. The investigation leads to his colleagues, his first wife, and another death that happened soon after his.
Sue Grafton set her series in Santa Teresa as a tribute to Ross Macdonald, and Kinsey’s first-person voice is its main pleasure: funny, self-deprecating, independent and observant. She lives in a converted garage, jogs, eats junk food and dislikes dressing up.
The mystery is competent, but the plot is fairly predictable. The prose is plain, and some of the supporting characters are sketchy. Kinsey’s sexual involvement with a suspect creates tension, but it also strains credibility.
The book is best read as the beginning of a long project. Grafton planned twenty-six novels, one for each letter, and wrote twenty-five before her death, the last being “Y” Is for Yesterday. The series improved considerably, with Kinsey’s world growing richer.
The 6 reflects a likeable but modest debut, significant for introducing one of the most popular female detectives of her era.
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