It is now nine weeks since 69-year-old Dr Duncan Purcell has vanished. His embittered first wife, Fiona, is just as sure he is still alive as his second wife, a former stripper 40 years his junior, is sure he is dead. Fiona hires private investigator Kinsey Malone to find out the truth.

In her latest adventure, Kinsey Millhone enters the world of noir. A shadowland in which the mysterious disappearance of a prominent physician leads Kinsey into a danger-filled maze of duplicity and double-dealing...It is now nine weeks since Dr Dowan Purcell vanished without trace. The sixtynine-year-old doctor had said goodnight to his colleagues at the Pacific Meadows nursing home, had climbed into his car and driven away - never to be seen again. His embittered first wife Fiona is convinced he is still alive. His second wife, Crystal - a former stripper forty years his junior - is just as sure he is dead. Enter private investigator Kinsey Malone, hired by Fiona to find out just what has happened to the man they loved. Enter also Tommy Hevener, an attractive flame-haired twenty-something who has set his romantic sights on Kinsey. And Tommy is a man with a very interesting past...

Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone is worldly wise and street smart and rather too caring for her own good; her principal problem in P is for Peril comes from the fact that she is caught up in two cases at once. On the one hand, she is investigating a missing doctor whose wife and ex-wife both suspect the other of foul play; on the other, she is trying to find a new office and gets new young landlords, one of whom is somewhat over-friendly. A sensible person might never let herself be polite to the aggressively charming Tommy, listen to the insurance claims investigator who accuses him of parricide or take an interest in the wellbeing of a disturbed adolescent girl marginal to either case. It is this fallible capacity to care more than is sensible that makes Kinsey so attractive a heroine--and also, as it happens, so effective. She is a good investigator because she is a good listener--much of her job consists of filtering out the information that is important from the ambient noise of people's chatter. As always, Sue Grafton has a good ear for the different speech patterns of various sorts of Californians and for the wrong notes that eventually tell us and Kinsey precisely who can be trusted and who is telling colossal lies; she also occasionally allows the reader to be a little bit quicker on the uptake than her detective.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Roz Kaveney

length: (cm)17.8 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)11.1