Private detective Kinsey Millhone feels a bit out of place in Nordstrom’s lingerie department, but she’s entirely in her element when she puts a stop to a brazen shoplifting spree. For her trouble she nearly gets run over in the parking lot by one of the fleeing thieves—and later learns that the one who didn’t get away has been found dead in an apparent suicide. But Audrey Vance’s grieving fiancé suspects murder and hires Kinsey to investigate—in a case that will reveal a big story behind a small crime, and lead her into a web that connects a shadowy “private banker,” an angry trophy wife, a spoiled kid with a spiraling addiction, and a brutal killer without a conscience…

Amazon Exclusive: A Letter from Sue Grafton

As with the last several books in the series, V Is for Vengeance was a long time in the making. I work by trial and error, keeping a running account of the process in journals that in this case totaled 967 single-spaced pages. It took me from March, 2009 until March, 2010 to settle on a storyline, and after that, it was ten months of hard labor. Women give birth to babies in less time, but surely without as much suffering. Brave soul that I am, I stuck with it, picking my way painstakingly from beginning to middle to end.

What sets the narrative in motion is Kinsey Millhoneâ??s spotting a shoplifter in an upscale department store. She alerts a sales clerk, who in turn notifies Security, which results in the womanâ??s arrest. Within two days, the sticky-fingered thief has taken a dive off a four-hundred-foot-high bridge, leaving her fiancé with troubling questions. While the overall subject matter is organized retail theft, of greater concern to Ms. Millhone is the fact that at the height of the action, shortly before sheâ??s punched in the face, she realizes itâ??s her thirty-eighth birthday and thus ends up celebrating the milestone with a broken nose and two black eyes.

--Sue Grafton, November, 2011

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