"G" is for gumshoe : a Kinsey Millhone mystery /

Feisty private investigator Kinsey Millhone continues to solve mysteries, in this case finding and taking an elderly woman to a nursing home near her daughter. But the lady mysteriously disappears within hours of her arrival. Painfully aware of the fact that a contract has been arranged for her own murder, Kinsey unravels the events of the past clue by clue, narrating the action-filled story in a realistic, easy-to-read, informal style. Less motivated students are sure to appreciate a character with a respectable, exciting job without having had a college education; although Kinsey had police training, her bodyguard freely admits he left high school but later took an equivalency test. This light mystery maintains interest to the end; everything happens quickly. --Claudia Moore, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

There's a contract out on the life of Kinsey Millhone, Santa Teresa's tough-tender ex-cop private eye (""A ""Is For Alibi, etc.). The alert comes from Nevada lawyer Lee Galishoff. Kinsey had helped him track down and eventually jail killer Tyrone Patty. Now the undercover grapevine has it that Patty's hired killer is targeting them, along with the D.A. and sentencing judge. All this comes just as Kinsey takes on a job for Irene Gersh, an uptight lady who wants her to find the mother she'd left behind three years before, then living in a desolate trailer park, once a Marine base, on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Kinsey finds the old lady--Agnes Grey--in a nursing home, half-deranged and rambling incomprehensibly about long-ago horrors. It's on a local road here that the first attack on Kinsey takes place, leaving her old Volkswagon totalled, her body bruised, and forcing her to call security expert Robert Dietz for help, as Galishoff had suggested. Then, back in Santa Teresa, Irene Gersh has her mother moved to a local nursing home--from which she promptly disappears--and Kinsey tries to go about her business under Deitz's guard, which soon becomes a more personal involvement. There's something dark and mysterious about Irene's family that poses a challenge to Kinsey. She painstakingly focuses in on it, eventually confronting two murderers in a slightly contrived meshing of plotlines. The story is complex; the body-count high; the sexual encounters feverish; and the villains chilling--in another can't-put-it-down outing for this talented author. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.