Q Is for Quarry (Thorndike Press Large Print Basic Series)

Rating:
Summary: A real cold case file
Review: Sue Grafton wrote this book in part to revieve interest in a Jane
Doe found in the locale of her books. In fiction she gives purpose to the lives of two old cop friends. You get a sense of the long hours chasing small details to a literal dead end

Rating:
Summary: Better than usual
Review: Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone series is a long-running string of private eye novels, among the first with a female protagonist. The author's been doing this for a quarter century now, and she's gotten very good at satisfying her fans, but she's only very rarely truly surprising in her plots or characters. This book is different, not because the plot itself is unusual, but because it's based on reality.

A retired coroner and several police detectives in Santa Barbara presented this case to Grafton several years ago: a young woman was stabbed to death and left in a quarry below a highway. No one ever established her identity, let alone getting any serious leads as to her killer, and there's been no new information in the case in the years since.

In the book, fictional characters take up the quest to at least identify the victim, if not the killer, in this case. Two retired policemen who found the body in the first place, and have been haunted by the case ever since, hire Kinsey Millhone to assist them in looking into things, but of course the two of them fade (health problems intervene) and Kinsey winds up searching for her identity, and eventually that of her killer, by herself.

I enjoyed this book, and the realistic aspect of the plot, in that it's based on a real incident, was frankly a hook. I'm curious to know if they have made any progress in the case since the book was written.