Whodunits with depth

November 22, 2009|Hallie Ephron, Globe Correspondent

Readers who relish another opportunity to spend time with Kinsey Milhone, that tough cookie who cuts her hair with nail scissors and cleans up swell on those rare occasions when she unrolls her little black dress, will be pleased with Sue Grafton’s “U is for Undertow.’’ It’s still the early 1980s; Kinsey is still just 38 years old; and she’s still in Santa Teresa (Grafton’s hometown, Santa Barbara).

This one opens in time-honored PI fashion - a new client taps on Kinsey’s office door and in walks trouble. Kinsey eyes Michael Sutton warily, wondering “if my blue-collar roots were as obvious to him as his upper-class status was to me.’’ Sutton tells her that he’s just recognized a man he saw two decades earlier burying something in the woods. It had been Sutton’s sixth birthday, and now he realizes that was the same day that a local girl vanished. Now Sutton wonders whether he witnessed one of her killers burying her body. Kinsey reluctantly agrees to spend 24 hours investigating this case, which seems colder than ice.

Many letters ago, Grafton introduced multiple narrators and intertwining plots and subplots, and here she uses them to good advantage. A second plot takes the reader 20 years into the past. Deborah Unruh, a sedate homemaker, barely recognizes her son Greg, a Berkeley dropout who lives out of a VW van with the monstrous Shelly and her little boy. The trio have been panhandling and stealing, but Shelley is pregnant with Greg’s child, and they want to crash with the Unruhs.

The two plot lines bob and weave and eventually connect, and along the way Kinsey struggles to come to terms (at long last) with her own relationship to aunts, cousins, and especially to a grandmother who she believed abandoned her. While some chapters are written from Kinsey’s familiar, jaundiced first-person viewpoint, others are narrated in the third-person from other points of view. It was disconcerting when, late in the book, Kinsey’s first-person narrator pops up in a chapter narrated by another character.

Much more than an old-fashioned whodunit, this is a story about owning up to mistakes, and about the past’s inexorable pull on one generation to come to terms with the next.