Free Y Is For Yesterday (Kinsey Millhone, #25) Picturized By Sue Grafton Provided As EPub

thisth book in the 'Kinsey Milhone' series, the private investigator looks into the ramifications of a school cheating scandal, The book can be read as a standalone, but knowing the characters is beneficial,





Private detective Kinsey Milhone is hired to deal with blackmail stemming from turmoil at Climping Academy an expensive prep school in Santa Teresa, California.




Ten years ago, in, a Climping freshman named Iris Lehmann stole a standardized test to help some upper class friends,



The theft had serious ramifications, and eventually led to the shooting death of Sloan Stevens the girl accused of ratting out the miscreants,



Four juniors were implicated in Sloan's death: Bayard Montgomery, Troy Rademaker, Fritz McCabe, and ringleader Austin Brown,



When the cops identified the perpetrators, Austin fled town and disappeared Bayard made a deal for his testimony Troy went to jail for five years and Fritz the actual shooter was incarcerated by the California Youth Authority CYA until he wasyearsold.


Skip to, and Fritz has just been released from the CYA,



He has a new problem however, In high school, Fritz and Troy made a sex tape showing them brutally assaultingyearold Iris Lehman, who was drunk and incapacitated, Now a copy of the disturbing tape has been sent to Fritz's wealthy parents, with a demand for,, . or the tape goes to the cops,



Fritz is terrified of going back to prison and his parents, Lauren and Hollis McCabe, know it's a mistake to open their wallets to a blackmailer.
Thus, the McCabes hire Kinsey to find out who sent the tape, with an eye to halting the extortion, Lauren says that Sloan stole the tape from Fritz's room shortly before she was killed, and hid it somewhere, It's clear that someone's now found the tape, and plans to use it to make some money, This sets up the premise of the story,

The book alternates back and forth between two timelines:where we see the events that led to Sloan's death andwhere Kinsey searches for the blackmailer, To suss out the extortionist, Kinsey interviews Sloan's friends and family, and the people who saw her on the day she died including Bayard, Iris, Fritz, Troy, and others.




Each of the students tells essentially the same story, which gets repetitious and boring,

Meanwhile, Kinsey has an additional problem which harks back to a previous book in the series, The PI is in the sights of a serial killer named Ned Lowe, who thinks Kinsey can lead him the 'souvenirs' he took from his teenage victims evidence that could send him to prison for life.




Thus Kinsey has to watch her back every second, in case Ned launches an attack,

In addition to all this, a number of secondary characters make an appearance, Some are series regulars, including: Kinsey's landlord Henry Pitts anyearold retired baker who makes delicious treats



Henry's older brother William a confirmed hypochondriac



William's wife Rosie a restaurant owner who serves original and odd Hungarian recipes and cheap wine



Kinsey's cousin Anna who recently moved to town Kinsey's cop friends Cheney Phillips and Jonah Robb and more.


Many things happen in the course of the story: Kinsey enrolls in selfdefense classes Henry takes in two homeless people, Pearl and Lucky, and Lucky's gigantic dog Killer Rosie has a big birthday party Henry's cat Ed disappears a pregnancy is revealed there's drama between Jonah and his wife etc, There's just TOO MUCH going on,

Moreover, the author describes each scene including minor ones that don't move the story along in extended, excruciating detail, Thus the book is at least onethird longer than necessary IMO,

In addition, it seems like Grafton instead of her usual straightforward storytelling uses every plot device seen in recent thrillers, Thus, the book feels overwritten and cluttered,

By the finale, all the story's issues are resolved, but with a sputter rather than a blast, . just not very exciting.

For me, this is one of the least successful Kinsey Milhone books,



If you're a Kinsey Milhone fan, you should probably read this book, If you're not familiar with the series, don't start here, . it might put you off the others,

Respectfully submitted: Barbara Saffer LOL

You can follow my reviews at sitelink blogspot . Stars. I wish I'd read this prior to Sue Grafton's passing in late, The sad thought that she didn't finish the series was ever present during my read, With "Y," it ends too abruptly, She's a great writer, so observant about people and their motives, and the details of thes, She had indicated that the next title would be "Z is for Zero," but nothing else, In these days of COVID, could it have been about a murder on Zoom But onlyfor "Y, " There's no diminution in Grafton's talents it's replete with more little insights on Kinsey and her index cards, her parking problems, and her difficulties with men, Love it all. But "Y" is too long,pages vs,for "A is for Alibi, " It starts with a drunken, drug enhanced sexual assault onyearold Iris Lehmann by four students from her private school, Fritz McCabe, Austin Brown, Troy Rademaker, and Bayard Montgomery.
A tape was made, and lost, and another girl was murdered, The tape resurfaced as part of an extortion effort when Fritz was released from jail a decade later, Talking of losing one's life, Kinsey comes close again when her recent nemesis from "X", Ned Lowe, reappears, I'll miss her. Octoberquite wordy could do without some of the detailStars for Y is for Yesterday by Sue Grafton, Paperback This was sad knowing that the series will never be completed, Ive really enjoyed this series, Kinsey Millhone is my favorite Pi, It has been a treat coming back to these books, They are so dependable. Sue Grafton was an amazing writer, I think her books hold up well compared to all the great detective novels, With the publication of "A" Is for Alibi in, Sue Grafton introduced Kinsey Millhone, a private detective who lived and worked in the fictional town of Santa Teresa, California.
The book was a revelation at a time when most medium to hardboiled detective fiction was still being written by men and when the protagonists of virtually all such novels were almost always men.
Grafton and Millhone were a breath of fresh air and helped transform the genre, Now, thirtyfive years and twentyfour entries later, we come to the final book in the series, Y Is for Yesterday, Sue Grafton died at the end of, and was thus unable to complete the series with the book she had once planned to title Z Is for Zero.


Although the world changed considerably betweenand, Kinsey Millhone did not, This last book is set in, only seven years after the first, Through the series, Kinsey remained essentially the same character, living in the same world, and surrounded by the same circle of friends and acquaintances that she knew in, A few boyfriends came and went through the series and occasionally a new relative appeared, most often briefly, but otherwise, the cast of characters was firmly fixed early on and like Kinsey, most of the other characters changed little or not at all.
The books themselves grew longer but not necessarily better, The earliest books in the series were, to my mind at least, easily the best while the latter ones were largely hit or miss, And sadly Y is mostly a miss,

The book follows two parallel tracks, one set inand the other in, In, a group of high school students made a video tape in which a fourteenyearold girl passed out after binge drinking and was then sexually assaulted by several boys.
The tape was somehow lost and shortly thereafter a girl in the circle of friends was shot to death after another raucous party, Two of the boys in the group were sent to prison as a result of the crime,

Fastforward towhen one of the boys who participated both in the sexual assault and the killing is released from prison, No sooner is he back home than he and his parents receive a copy of the missing videotape and a note demanding,, If the demand is not met the blackmailer threatens to turn the videotape over to the police, which will almost certainly result in the boy going straight back to prison, this time for the sexual assault.


The parents hire Kinsey Millhone to find the blackmailer and eliminate the threat, From that point on, the book alternates betweenand, We watch Kinsey conduct her investigation and in a number of flashback chapters, we see the events ofthat lead to the death of the young woman, Several of thechapters are also devoted to the P, O. V. of the blackmailers rather than that of Millhone, If all that weren't enough, we have a third major issue, involving a man named Ned Lowe who had assaulted Kinsey in an earlier book and is now back to finish the job.
So while Kinsey investigates the blackmail case, she also has to take selfdefense classes and fight off Lowe on several occasions,

There's no easy way to say this, but the end result is largely a mess in desperate need of a good editor, "A" Is for Alibi was a lean, spare book that clocked in atpages, The tension built from the very first paragraph and didn't release the reader until the last, Y, by comparison, is a bloatedpages, and there's not a single moment of real tension in the entire novel,

The chapters flashing back toadd nothing of any consequence to the story and could have easily been eliminated, allowing Millhone to discover any relevant information revealed in those chapters during the course of her investigation.
The whole saga of Ned Lowe also adds nothing to the story and could have also been eliminated, producing a much leaner and more focused novel,

In the end, when all of this business is finally and mercifully resolved, one can only breathe a sigh of relief and feel a profound sense of regret for what might have been.
I understand that a cardinal rule of reviewing is that you are supposed to review the book that the author wrote and not the one you wish she might have written.
But as someone who loved the early books in this series, I've long been saddened by the course the series took or, more accurately, did not take,

I understand that Sue Grafton had millions of fans who love the character and the series exactly as they are, and I suppose that one should never argue with success.
But I truly regret the fact that Grafton decided to leave Kinsey Millhone stranded in thes, never to age or evolve or to confront the challenges of the years that followed.
Frankly, after fifteen or sixteen books I got tired of reading about Henry, Kinsey's ninetyyearold landlord, about Rosie the Hungarian bar owner and about all the rest of these characters who, like Kinsey, never changed at all.


By comparison, I can't help but think of two of Kinsey's contemporaries, Lucas Davenport who first appeared in, and Harry Bosch, who first appeared in, Both of those series now exceed the number of books in the Kinsey Millhone series, and over the years those two characters have evolved and changed with the times, meeting the challenges of the changing years.
They've become infinitely richer, as have the worlds and the casts of characters around them, and to my mind at least, it's a shame that Kinsey Millhone didn't have that same opportunity.
At least in the early years, Sue Grafton was just as good a writer as either John Sandford or Michael Connelly, and I would love to see what she might have done with the character had she made different choices.


As a reader who's stayed with this series through thick and thin and from "A" to "Y", I'm sorry to see it end, especially on this note.
I only had the opportunity to meet Sue Grafton a couple of times, but she was a very nice woman with a fabulous sense

of humor, and I very much wish she would have had the chance to formally end this series on her own terms.
Three for Y Is for Yesterday, and four sentimental for a longrunning series and for what might have been, .