Kinsey Millhone is an independent Private Investigator. She went through the police academy and spent a couple of years on the Santa Theresa Police force but she didn’t like the regimentation. Kinsey prefers to work in her own way and independent of an “upper management”. Kinsey has done pretty well over the past 10 or so years taking on private cases. She has been able to solve most of them to the satisfaction of her clients and so makes a pretty good living.
At the start of this tale Kinsey is working on paperwork in her office when a young man arrives to ask for her help. Michael Sutton is in his mid-twenties and recently experienced a shocking recall of memory of back near his sixth birthday. He had been playing at the home of a friend and walked out into the woods behind the house where he came upon two men who were digging a hole and about to bury something there. They joked with him and told him they were pirates and were hunting for treasure. At the time he was excited about it and believed the men. But he recently saw an article about a young girl who had been kidnapped during that week. The girl had never been found.
Sutton had gone to the police but since there was not any concrete evidence they could not do anything. The lieutenant sent the man to Kinsey, calling her to tell her that his story seemed genuine. Kinsey looked into the matter and believed Sutton too. She tracked down the house and the clearing in the woods and asked the police to come out. They came with their cadaver sniffing dogs and dug up a body. But it was the body of a dog. It seems that Sutton had seen something but it wasn’t the young girl the men were burying.
As Kinsey continues to look into the mystery she realizes that Sutton is a bit on the unstable side. His memories are gilded with drama and some imagination. Yet Kinsey still believes there is a grain of truth in there somewhere and she is determined to get to the bottom of the case of the missing girl.
Sutton recognizes one of the two men he say years ago in Santa Theresa and Kinsey tracks down various clues eventually leading to this man and a friend of his who had been involved with neighbors of the girl’s parents in a wealthy side of town. Back when the two were teenagers they had been into dealing drugs and getting their spending money robbing the homes of people in the wealthy neighborhoods while they were gone on vacation. The two worked up a scheme to extort money by kidnapping. Their first kidnapping had gone well and netted them $15,000. The girl was returned safely. The second time though the little girl they kidnapped had an allergy and died when they administered the sleeping pills in her lemonade.
This is the mystery Kinsey is investigating for Michael Sutton. She gets closer and closer to the two men and they get frightened. Eventually one murders Sutton to keep him quiet and then tries to kill his partner before leaving the country. But Kinsey stops him in the exciting ending on top of a hill in a deserted park overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
“U is for Undertow” is a typically readable and interesting private detective mystery. Grafton does her usual competent job of spinning the tale and it is very satisfying. I give this one a 7 of 10 on the Weaver meter.
