Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Dec 2009
416 pages
Genre: Mysteries
Publication Information
It's April, 1988, a month before Kinsey Millhone's thirty-eighth birthday, and she's alone in her office doing paperwork when a young man arrives unannounced. He has a preppy air about him and looks as if he'd be carded if he tried to buy booze, but Michael Sutton is twenty-seven, an unemployed college dropout. Twenty-one years earlier, a four-year-old girl disappeared. A recent reference to her kidnapping has triggered a flood of memories. Sutton now believes he stumbled on her lonely burial when he was six years old. He wants Kinsey's help in locating the child's remains and finding the men who killed her. It's a long shot but he's willing to pay cash up front, and Kinsey agrees to give him one day.
As her investigation unfolds, she discovers Michael Sutton has an uneasy relationship with the truth. In essence, he's the boy who cried wolf. Is his current story true or simply one more in a long line of fabrications?
"[B]oth loyal Kinsey fans and those new to the canon will find much to like." - Publishers Weekly
"Her latest is fresh, complex, fast-paced, and immensely enjoyable. Kinsey's sharp 1980s research skills might even leave a few readers nostalgic for a pre-Google world." - Library Journal
"Short on mystery, but rewardingly sensitive in teasing out the shock waves that reached from the Summer of Love to the heart of Santa Teresa." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about U is for Undertow was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sue Grafton entered the mystery field in 1982 with the publication of 'A' Is for Alibi, which introduced female hard-boiled private investigator, Kinsey Millhone, operating out of the fictional town of Santa Teresa, (aka Santa Barbara) California. 'B' is for Burglar followed in 1985 and the series, now referred to as 'the alphabet' mysteries, continued going strong until the 2017 release of 'Y' is for Yesterday. In addition to her books, she's published several Kinsey Millhone short stories, and with her husband, Steven Humphrey, wrote numerous movies for television, including A Killer in the Family (starring Robert Mitchum), Love on the Run (starring Alec Baldwin and Stephanie Zimbalist), and two Agatha Christie adaptations, Sparkling Cyanide and Caribbean Mystery, which starred ...
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