O Is For Outlaw: Summary and book reviews of O Is For Outlaw by Sue Grafton, plus links to an excerpt from O Is For Outlaw and a biography of Sue Grafton.

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.

"O" Is for Outlaw: Kinsey's fifteenth excursion into the dark side of human nature.

Through fourteen books, readers have been fed short rations when it comes to Kinsey Millhone's past: a morsel here, a dollop there. We know about the aunt who raised her, the second husband who left her, the long-lost family up the California coast. But husband number one has remained a blip on the screen. Until now. "O" Is for Outlaw: a revealing excursion into Kinsey's past.

Author's Note

Just a brief note to clarify the time frame for these "alphabet" novels. For those of you confused about what appear to be errors in my calculation of ages and dates, please be aware that "A" Is for Alibi takes place in May of 1982, "B" Is for Burglar in June of 1982, "C" Is for Corpse in August of 1982, and so forth. Since the books are sequential, Ms. Millhone is caught up in a time warp and is currently living and working in the year 1986, without access to cell phones, the Internet, or other high-tech equipment used by modern-day private investigators. She relies instead on persistence, imagination, and ingenuity; the stock-in-trade of the traditional gumshoe throughout hard-boiled history. As her biographer, I generally avoid mention of topical issues and date-related events. You'll find few, if any, references to current movies, fads, fashions, or politics. This book is an exception in that events connect back to the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975, eleven years before the incidents described herein. Given narrative requirements, I populate historical actions with fictional characters and project wholly invented persons into academic institutions and political arenas, in which their "real-life" counterparts will doubtless dispute their presence. In my view, the delight of fiction is its enhancement of the facts and its embellishment of reality. Aside from that--as my father used to say--"I know it's all true because I made it up myself "--  Sue Grafton

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