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Book Summary and Reviews of U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

U is for Undertow

A Kinsey Millhone Mystery

by Sue Grafton

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  • Dec 2009, 416 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

It's April, 1988, a month before Kinsey Millhone's thirty-eighth birthday, and she's alone in her office doing paperwork when a young man arrives unannounced. He has a preppy air about him and looks as if he'd be carded if he tried to buy booze, but Michael Sutton is twenty-seven, an unemployed college dropout. Twenty-one years earlier, a four-year-old girl disappeared. A recent reference to her kidnapping has triggered a flood of memories. Sutton now believes he stumbled on her lonely burial when he was six years old. He wants Kinsey's help in locating the child's remains and finding the men who killed her. It's a long shot but he's willing to pay cash up front, and Kinsey agrees to give him one day.

As her investigation unfolds, she discovers Michael Sutton has an uneasy relationship with the truth. In essence, he's the boy who cried wolf. Is his current story true or simply one more in a long line of fabrications?

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"[B]oth loyal Kinsey fans and those new to the canon will find much to like." - Publishers Weekly

"Her latest is fresh, complex, fast-paced, and immensely enjoyable. Kinsey's sharp 1980s research skills might even leave a few readers nostalgic for a pre-Google world." - Library Journal

"Short on mystery, but rewardingly sensitive in teasing out the shock waves that reached from the Summer of Love to the heart of Santa Teresa." - Kirkus Reviews

This information about U is for Undertow was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

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Annu

Amazing
Beautifully written and got me engaged . Couldn’t put the book down.

Carolyn

Not impressed
I bought this book at the Dollar Store, and quickly found out why it was there. I have not read any other books in this series, and won't be doing so in the future. This author writes WAY too many details about what the characters do. It makes it boring and hard to stay focused on the story. As the story progresses it becomes intriguing, but then it stops suddenly, almost as if the artist was tired of the story and didnt want to write any more! Perhaps the author should have developed one or two books better, and forgotten about trying to write 26 books!

mike o.

just another
Just another whodunit. Schmaltzy mother/child relationship/angst re: momma done me wrong. sad rendition of alcoholic reasoning. Seemed like a quick contract obligation book.

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Author Information

Sue Grafton Author Biography

Sue Grafton entered the mystery field in 1982 with the publication of 'A' Is for Alibi, which introduced female hard-boiled private investigator, Kinsey Millhone, operating out of the fictional town of Santa Teresa, (aka Santa Barbara) California. 'B' is for Burglar followed in 1985 and the series, now referred to as 'the alphabet' mysteries, continued going strong until the 2017 release of 'Y' is for Yesterday. In addition to her books, she's published several Kinsey Millhone short stories, and with her husband, Steven Humphrey, wrote numerous movies for television, including A Killer in the Family (starring Robert Mitchum), Love on the Run (starring Alec Baldwin and Stephanie Zimbalist), and two Agatha Christie adaptations, Sparkling Cyanide and Caribbean Mystery, which starred ...

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