He called himself Alvin Limardo, and the job he had for Kinsey was cut-and-dried: locate a kid who'd done him a favor and pass on a check for $25,000. It was only later, after he'd stiffed her for her retainer, that Kinsey found out his name was Daggett. John Daggett. Ex-con. Inveterate liar. Chronic drunk. And dead. The cops called it an accident--death by drowning. Kinsey wasn't so sure. Pulled into the detritus of a dead man's life, Kinsey soon...

It's no surprise that Grafton has taken on new territory in her 16th book of the alphabet series, this time entering the world of noir. It's a world cast in shades of black amid shafts of steel and silver, a shadow land in which the disappearance of a prominent physician leads Kinsey Millhone into a danger-filled maze of duplicity as she taps into a cunning Medicare fraud.

" Of the #1 New York Times-bestselling Kinsey Millhone series, NPR said, "Makes me wish there were more than 26 letters." Two dead bodies changed the course of my life that fall. One of them I knew and the other I'd never laid eyes on until I saw him in the morgue. The first was a local PI of suspect reputation. He'd been gunned down near the beach at Santa Teresa. It looked like a robbery gone bad. The other was on the beach six weeks later. He'd...