Kinsey and me (Pan Macmillan)

My name is Kinsey Millhone. I'm a private investigator, licensed, bonded, insured; white, female, age thirty-two, unmarried, and physically fit. That Monday morning, I was sitting in my office with my feet up, wondering what life would bring, when a woman walked in and tossed a photograph on my desk. 'Somebody killed my husband.' Thirty one years since A is for Alibi was first published, Sue Grafton presents Kinsey and Me, her first compendium of short stories. It features nine Kinsey Millhone short stories, each a gem of detection, as well as autobiographical pieces written in the decade after Grafton's mother died. Together, they show just how much Kinsey Millhone is a distillation of her creator's past, even as they reveal a child who, free of parental discipline, read everything and roamed everywhere. But the dark side of such freedom was that very parental distance...Kit walked through the empty house, listening to her footsteps resounding against the pale dead floors...the windows stood open to the summer heat and a wind that smelled of lilacs touched at the screens.From her bedroom, she could look out into the side yard where the cherry tree had blossomed every April since time began...And now the house was being sold and the land, their mother was dead, their father remarried: all of life, everything was breaking apart, breaking down, being levelled, destroyed, razed, rendered obsolete, that childhood, that life, that family as odd and unhappy as it had been...Published in the UK for the first time, this dazzling and often moving collection displays the depth and range of Grafton's writing and reminds us of her unique talent as a storyteller.