SUE GRAFTON – X.   G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, August 2015; paperback “premium edition,” August 2016.

    Going back to read my review of W Is for Wasted, I see some significant signs of how Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series was progressing back then, and to my mind, the answer is not well.

    First of all, I said, “The case itself is not all that interesting…,” then I said:

    “I’m also not sure why Grafton has Kinsey relate everything she does, down to the minutest bit of minutia possible, whether it be meals, areas of town she drives through, or the GNP of the nation.”

    In X, the case is even less interesting than in W, with much of the the story dealing with loose threads left behind from the earlier one, and Grafton’s penchant to spell out in detail everything Kinsey does, from preparing breakfast, dealing with her landlord Henry’s cat, to delineating every turn along the way, complete with street names, whenever she drives from one place in the fictional town of Santa Teresa to another, seems to have gotten worse.

    Half of what happens in the first 192 pages is banal and uninteresting (see above). The other half, dealing with one of the two cases she seems to be on (they may yet be connected), something to do with a lawsuit that took place years and years ago, as well as a coded list of names of women connected with it, is even less compelling.

    And this is as far as I got. There are still 240 pages to go, and I see no promise of improvement. If reviewers are not supposed to review books they haven’t finished, I will promise to do better next time.