"I" is for Innocent by Sue Grafton

Finished on 8/4.

The initial murder is pretty gruesome - a woman is shot in the eye through the peephole in her front door. Her husband is charged with the murder but is acquitted. Five years later, her first husband still believes that the guy did it and wants the case reopened - going for civil penalties because of double jeopardy.

The first private detective on the case has a heart attack and dies and Kinsey enters the scene. She finds odd discrepancies in the original detective's investigation and a vast cast of potential murderers.

In a scene rather similar to the dumpster scene in "A," she does blow away the bad in the end.

"H" is for Homicide by Sue Grafton

Finished on 8/4.

The basic business is insurance fraud. Kinsey ends up undercover without backup in an auto insurance scam business.

The next batch are going to be brief - because I really want to get caught up!

By the way, she still didn't kill anyone.

Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery

Finished on 8/2.

Well, Emily will never take the place of Anne of Green Gables. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact reason: both are orphans taken in reluctantly, although Emily is with family; they are both imaginative and lead their friends into some crazy scrapes.

The setting is also PEI, and Montgomery makes every part of the island sound positively idyllic.

Emily just doesn't seem to stand out or up or whatever like Anne does. Emily would never have dyed her hair green - although she does cut herself bangs.

"G" is for Gumshoe by Sue Grafton

Finished on 7/31.

This is the seventh, and so far, Grafton is doing quite well at making her story fit the preselected title. This suddenly reminded me of John D. Macdonald's Travis McGee titles - all those colors, 21 of them - not to mention more than fifty other books. Okay, add him to the list.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, this is about a Grafton book. The gumshoe is tough, macho dude Dietz (Robert?) I'm sure his given name has been mentioned, but he is so macho that it is seldom used). Actually, Dietz was introduced, although neither we nor Kinsey met him face-to-face, in an earlier book in the series - I think it was "A." This time he is very much a presence as he is hired to be Kinsey's bodyguard after an unhappy convict confides his plan to "get" the judge, prosecutor, defense attorney, and primary witness against him (Kinsey) to a police informant in prison.

One of his hitmen succeeds in killing the judge and the rest go into high security mode - enter Dietz.

In the meantime, Kinsey is trying to carry out an investigation of her own, unrelated to the hit list. This takes her out and about and, naturally, puts her in the sights of another killer.

She still hasn't killed anyone. I'm beginning to be concerned that I allowed someone to put their bias over on me, although there are still nineteen books to go. Or will be, I think Grafton is up to "W."

Spider Bones by Kathy Reichs

Finished on 7/30.

In case you, like I, thought that spiders didn't have bones - Spider is a name. I'm not sure he is a character, because he is dead at the beginning of the story and has been for many years - or has he? A fairly fresh corpse found in Canada is identified as a man who supposedly died in Vietnam in 1968.

The background is the military operations for identifying and returning the bodies of MIAs. The main laboratory is in Hawaii and Tempe (and, one assumes, Reichs herself) worked for them for a period some years earlier.

In other news, Tempe's daughter Katy is with her in Hawaii as a change of scene after her more-than-a-friend is killed in a Taliban ambush of a humanitarian convoy. And Ryan shows up (the precipitating murder took place in his bailiwick) with his daughter, Lily, a recovering(?) drug addict. And they are all staying in the same house - predictable fireworks between the daughters, not so much between Tempe and Ryan.

Nerve by Dick Francis

Finished on 7/29.

Francis does a very nice line in titles. In this one a jockey, Rob Finn, who is beginning to gain a reputation as someone who can be put up on the worst mounts because he is utterly fearless, is set up and made to appear to have lost his nerve. This he proceeds to prove to be utterly untrue by tracking and dealing with a vicious and ruthless racing insider.

Francis also gives his character a great deal of depth beyond the racing setting. He is the complete outsider in a family of musicians. This certainly telegraphs that he is determined to go his own way regardless of a level of pressure under which many of his colleagues have collapsed - even to the point of suicide.

Dead Cert by Dick Francis

Finished on 7/27.

Seemed like a good time to reread these. A few weeks ago I reread Shattered and remembered that I hadn't read any of them for years.

So, back to the beginning. This doesn't seem to show any of the "first book" hesitations that sometimes appear in first novels of series, but then, technically, this isn't the first of a series - it is just Francis's first novel. Except the four books featuring Sid Halley, all of Francis's books stand alone. There is the common background of horse racing, but characters don't repeat. He wrote 38 of them - in partnership with his wife for many years, until her death, and the last four with his son, Felix, who, I believe, is continuing the "non-series." Has to beat teaching high school physics.

Here we have Alan York, an amateur steeplechase jockey from Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe). His father has sent him to England (with a string of horses) to manage the London end of the family business which conveniently leaves him enough free time to race. He stumbles onto a system of fraud which has cost the life of his friend and mentor.

Setting the pattern that I seem to recall from Francis's books, Alan comes very close to losing his own life in his pursuit of his friend's killers. Have to love the passage where he escapes from them cross-country on a horse as the bad guys chase him in taxicabs.