H is for Homicide by Sue Grafton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The problem with real life is there's no musical score. In movies, you know you're in danger because there's an ominous chord underlining the scene, [...] Real life is dead quiet, so you're never quite sure if there's trouble coming up. A possible exception is stepping into a strange apartment full of guys in hairnets."

In my Re-read Early Grafton project I skipped H and read I instead, the weakest installment of the series so far (see I Is for Innocent). Finally I got hold of the missing tome and am happy to report that H is OK. As usual with Grafton's novels and most other mysteries and crime dramas, the book reads better at the beginning than toward the end, but at least the quality drop is not so steep here. What distinguishes the novel from all its predecessors in the series is the change of the overall story concept: it is markedly different in H than what the readers got accustomed to in A through G. Naturally, I love it when the author goes against the readers' expectations.

In the setup of the plot, our intrepid PI, Kinsey Millhone, has finished a job in San Diego and is returning to her office, which she rents from an insurance company. She finds the building a center of police activity. A claim adjuster from the company, whom Kinsey knew well, has been shot dead.

Kinsey's current job is to prove insurance fraud by a woman named Bibianna Diaz. She pretends to befriend Bibianna and the reader is treated to best passages of the novel that happen in a "lowlife bar":

"This was where the C- singles came to hunt. There were no yuppies, no preppies, no slumming execs, no middle-class, white-bread college types. This was a hard-core pickup place for bikers and hamburger hookers, who'd screw anyone for a meal."

Ms. Grafton's descriptions of human mating behavior are priceless, to me way better than the crime thread. Kinsey meets an ex-cop whom she knew during her years on the Santa Teresa police force. And then...

And then the pace of the plot speeds up tenfold and dramatic events happen. The publisher probably divulges the whole thing on the cover of the book, but I do not believe in providing spoilers. Anyway, we have an unexpected bonding episode between Kinsey and Bibianna and whole lot of other goings-on.

There are many good things in the novel. Night driving around the Greater Los Angeles Area is described vividly and in nice prose. How about the scene in a doctor's waiting room where all the patients smoke? Ah, beautiful memories of the times where I needed to inhale two long unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes during the 10-minute break between two lectures that I was giving! These were the days! And we learn a lot - a lot! - about how auto accident insurance scams work.

I find the denouement rather implausible but it is told in quite a cinematic fashion. Overall, I like the novel, mainly because of the change in the story pattern and the scenes in the Meat Locker bar.

Three-and-a-quarter stars.


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