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Summary
Summary
Beginning slowly with the day-to-day life of a private eye, Grafton suddenly shifts from the perspective of Kinsey Millhone to that of Solana Rojas, introducing listeners to a chilling sociopath. Rojas is not her birth name. It is an identity she cunningly stole, an identity that gives her access to private caregiving jobs. The true horror of this novel builds with excruciating tension as the listener foresees the awfulness that lies ahead. The wrenching suspense lies in whether Kinsey Millhone will realize what is happening in time to intervene. T IS FOR TRESPASS dealing with issues of identity theft, elder abuse, betrayal of trust, and the breakdown in the institutions charged with caring for the weak and the dependent - targets an all-too-real rip in the social fabric. Grafton takes us into far darker territory than she has ever traversed, leaving us with a true sense of the horror embedded in the seeming ordinariness of the world we think we know. The result is terrifying.
Author Notes
Sue Grafton was born in Louisville, Kentucky on April 24, 1940. She received a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Louisville in 1961. Her first novel Keziah Dane was published in 1967. Her second novel, The Lolly-Madonna War, was published in 1969 and she adapted it into a screenplay. After that movie was released in 1973, she worked intermittently writing for television. A series she created, Nurse, ran for two seasons on CBS in the early 1980s.
Her writing career took off when A Is for Alibi was published in 1982 and received the Mysterious Stranger Award. This was the beginning of the Kinsey Millhone Mystery series. B Is for Burglar won the Shamus and Anthony Awards and C Is for Corpse won the Anthony Award. She also received the Cartier Diamond Dagger, the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from Bouchercon, and the Ross Macdonald Literary Award. She died from cancer on December 28, 2017 at the age of 77.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Tony award-winner Judy Kaye has been the voice of private eye Kinsey Millhone since the beginning, and 19 titles later, she's still an inspired choice, capturing the character's unique combination of femininity and ruggedness, intelligence, street savvy and self-confidence with just a hint of uncertainty. Trespass is possibly a series best. Both reader and sleuth are working at full tilt as Kinsey interacts with a large cast. Her foremost opponent is the devious and homicidal black widow who has spun a web around the detective's aged and infirmed next door neighbor. Grafton deviates from Kinsey's narration to delve into the killer's history and mind-set, underlining the seriousness of her threat. Kaye offers a crisp, chillingly cold aural portrait of a sociopath capable of anything. Kaye's spot-on interpretation of the two very different leading characters would be praiseworthy enough, but she's just as effective in capturing the elderly men and women, the screechy landladies, the drawling rednecks, the velvet-tongued smooth operators, the fast talking lawyers and all the inhabitants of Kinsey's world. Simultaneous release with the Putnam hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 17). (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Grafton focuses on the soul-wrenching trespasses of elder abuse and identity theft in her latest Kinsey Millhone mystery. Private eye Millhone has an elderly, nasty neighbor who falls victim to a sociopath. The narrative shuttles between Millhone's first-person narration and the point of view of the sociopath, a woman who has stolen a nurse's identity, has committed murder, and finds caring for the elderly a profitable way to clean up fast. This double-narrative device works especially well here: we're both entertained by Millhone's hard-earned cynicism and horrified by the sociopath's calm assessment of what people are vulnerable and how she can play them. Grafton turns in an unnerving account of the forms that elder abuse currently takes, from home care through institutional neglect. She also is utterly knowledgeable about identity theft. The book drags quite a bit, though, since it's obvious from the start that Millhone will uncover the nurse's wrongdoings.The writing also suffers from the unnecessary insertion of details about Millhone jogging, doing errands, and slogging through routine paperwork. As Grafton makes her way through the alphabet, not only is she using every letter, but, in this book at least, she seems to use every letter thousands of unnecessary times.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Early in THE REDBREAST (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.95), an elegant and complex thriller by the Norwegian musician, economist and crime writer Jo Nesbo, an old man who has just received a death sentence from his doctor goes into the palace gardens in Oslo and kills an ancient oak tree. "Yes!" you think. "What a terrible act, but what wonderful symbolism!" And you'll be amazed when, hundreds of pages later, the real reason for the aboricide is revealed, along with the answers to other seemingly minor mysteries (including the significance of the title) that figure in the novel's ingenious design. The engineering of the interlocking plot pieces is intricate because it has to support Nesbo's complicated ideas - and dire thoughts - about Norwegian nationalism, past and present. While giving his ambitious book the form of a police procedural, featuring Harry Hole, an attractive if familiarly flawed loose cannon of a cop, the author expands his street-level subplots into a narrative that reaches all the way back to World War II, when Norway was under German occupation. There's a pattern to the various criminal activities Hole investigates, from the black-market sale of a German semiautomatic hunting rifle ("the ultimate professional murder weapon") to the "fascist nests" of neo-Nazis who can be counted on to disrupt most national holidays. But the pattern doesn't emerge until the detective investigates the present-day lives and past histories of a group of war veterans, among the many Norwegians who volunteered to fight against the Russians on the Eastern front and were later denounced as traitors. Told in flashbacks, the parallel story of their forgotten war begins in a trench in 1942, develops in harrowingly beautiful scenes of harsh wartime suffering and ends in 1945 with mass executions in Oslo. Pristinely translated by Don Bartlett, Nesbo's book eloquently uses its multiple horrors to advance a disturbing argument: suppressing history is an open invitation for history to repeat itself. For sheer likability, no private eye comes close to Sue Grafton's endearing California sleuth, Kinsey Millhone, who has been making friends with readers for more than two decades. Settling into T IS FOR TRESPASS (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95), the 20th mystery in an evergreen series, first means making sure that all's right in Kinsey's world. Is it still the 1980s in Santa Teresa? Check. Is she still renting a studio apartment from her octogenarian landlord, Henry - and is Henry still baking bread? Check and check. Now for the kicker: Does she still have her warm heart and wicked sense of humor? Absolutely. Just because Kinsey is adorable doesn't make her a pushover, and the issue she takes up here - criminal negligence and abuse of the elderly - is as serious as it is ugly. Gus Vronsky, a cranky old neighbor, has a bad fall at Christmastime, and his greatniece from New York hires a licensed vocational nurse named Solana Rojas to take care of him, after first hiring Kinsey to check her credentials. But aside from noticing that "there's something creepy about her," Kinsey doesn't know what we do (from chapters told from the caretaker's perspective) - namely that "Solana" stole her identity and has evil plans for Gus. For all its familiar comforts, this is one sad, tough book. Ian Rutledge, the Scotland Yard man in Charles Todd's outstanding series of historical mysteries, has a wonderful capacity for compassion - a quality this shell-shocked (and guilt-ridden) World War I veteran acquired over four hellish years in the battlefields of France. That heightened sensibility comes into play in A PALE HORSE (Morrow, $23.95), when the War Office orders Rutledge to locate an eccentric scientist who has disappeared from his secluded cottage in Berkshire. In penetrating interviews with the scientist's reclusive neighbors, Rutledge comes to realize that they're all emotionally wounded outcasts of society ("lepers, without the sores") and that many of the secrets they're guarding go back to the Great War. Even the huge prehistoric animal carved into the whitechalk cliffs above the cottages reminds one tenant of the cloud of poison gas that passed over Ypres like "a great horse moving across a barren meadow." However they apportion their literary chores, the mother and son who write together as Charles Todd clearly share an affinity for quiet souls haunted by unquiet memories. Runaway capitalism can be held accountable for a multitude of social sins, but can it be blamed for the acts of a serial killer? That's one of the many intriguing questions posed by the poet and translator Qiu Xiaolong in his latest Inspector Chen mystery, RED MANDARIN DRESS (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95). The erudite Shanghai detective (who writes romantic poetry to clear his head) has to postpone his participation in an intensive course in classical Chinese literature when murder victims wearing identical mandarin dresses begin turning up around the city. Are these aberrant crimes somehow linked to modern China's struggle to contain the widespread corruption that accompanies unregulated economic growth? You bet. But the novel also contains pertinent references to the huge ideological upheaval of the Cultural Revolution - a subject that's never far from the surface in this intelligent series - along with many poignant hints that once it's lost, a country's cultural identity can never be restored. Jo Nesbo's thriller takes us back to World War II and the German occupation of his native country.
Kirkus Review
Kinsey Millhone's 20th case, which pits her against a creepy pair of abusers who don't know of each other's existence, is one of her finest. In between big jobs (S Is for Silence, 2005, etc.), Kinsey works as a process server and does spadework on insurance claims. Now (in the winter of 1987-88) she's staying busy serving papers on a dad who owes child support and gathering evidence to show who was at fault in a low-speed traffic accident that left Gladys Fredrickson seriously injured. Kinsey doesn't know that a more important case is unfolding much closer to home. Her irascible old next-door neighbor Gus Vronsky, tottering around his house after a fall sent him to the hospital, has fallen into the clutches of predatory caregiver Solana Rojas. Hired by Gus's self-absorbed great-niece to check out Solana's credentials, Kinsey is initially fooled because Solana, whose backstory Grafton unfolds in a series of chapters from her point of view, isn't really Solana; she's stolen her identity from someone whose record is clean. Settling into Gus's house, Solana begins to pick him clean while Kinsey's distracted by her caseload, which eventually leads her to a child molester quite as frightening in his way as Solana. Each of Kinsey's cases stretches the private-eye formula in new ways. Her 20th, which reads like vintage Ruth Rendell, will bring shivers to every reader with an aged parent--or a young child. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Grafton tackles identity theft and elder abuse in her 20th Kinsey Millhone mystery (after S Is for Silence). Gus Vronsky, Kinsey's elderly next-door neighbor, suffers a fall and needs in-home care. A health-care nurse named Solana Rojas is hired, and Kinsey even does the background check, finding nothing out of order. As Gus's condition deteriorates and Solana limits access to her patient, Kinsey and her landlord, Henry, suspect that something is a little off with Solana-and "little off" doesn't fully describe this identity thief and true sociopath. Digging around more carefully, Kinsey unearths horrifying details of Solana's past and must act quickly to save Gus. This is vintage Grafton, set in the 1980s but scarily current, carefully plotted, and fast paced. Kinsey even flirts with healthful eating (vegetables are consumed), but the reader soon sighs with relief when Kinsey returns to her old habits, frequenting the drive-thru at McDonald's and enjoying pal Rosie's hearty Hungarian fare. Recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 8/07.]-Andrea Y. Griffith, Loma Linda Univ. Libs., CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 SOLANA She had a real name, of course-the one she'd been given at birth and had used for much of her life-but now she had a new name. She was Solana Rojas, whose personhood she'd usurped. Gone was her former self, eradicated in the wake of her new identity. This was as easy as breathing for her. She was the youngest of nine children. Her mother, Marie Terese, had borne her first child, a son, when she was seventeen and a second son when she was nineteen. Both were the product of a relationship never sanctified by marriage, and while the two boys had taken their father's name, they'd never known him. He'd been sent to prison on a drug charge and he'd died there, killed by another inmate in a dispute over a pack of cigarettes. At the age of twenty-one, Marie Terese had married a man named Panos Agillar. She'd borne him six children in a period of eight years before he left her and ran off with someone else. At the age of thirty, she found herself alone and broke, with eight children ranging in age from thirteen years to three months. She'd married again, this time to a hardworking, responsible man in his fifties. He fathered Solana-his first child, her mother's last, and their only offspring. During the years when Solana was growing up, her siblings had laid claim to all the obvious family roles: the athlete, the soldier, the cut-up, the achiever, the drama queen, the hustler, the saint, and the jack-of-all-trades. What fell to her lot was to play the ne'er-do-well. Like her mother, she'd gotten pregnant out of wedlock and had given birth to a son when she was barely eighteen. From that time forward, her progress through life had been hapless. Nothing had ever gone right for her. She lived paycheck to paycheck with nothing set aside and no way to get ahead. Or so her siblings assumed. Her sisters counseled and advised her, lectured and cajoled, and finally threw up their hands, knowing she was never going to change. Her brothers expressed exasperation, but usually came up with money to bail her out of a jam. None of them understood how wily she was. She was a chameleon. Playing the loser was her disguise. She was not like them, not like anyone else, but it had taken her years to fully appreciate her differences. At first she thought her oddity was a function of the family dynamic, but early in elementary school, the truth dawned on her. The emotional connections that bound others to one another were absent in her. She operated as a creature apart, without empathy. She pretended to be like the little girls and boys in her grade, with their bickering and tears, their tattling, their giggles, and their efforts to excel. She observed their behavior and imitated them, blending into their world until she seemed much the same. She chimed in on conversations, but only to feign amusement at a joke, or to echo what had already been said. She didn't disagree. She didn't offer an opinion because she had none. She expressed no wishes or wants of her own. She was largely unseen-a mirage or a ghost-watching for little ways to take advantage of them. While her classmates were self-absorbed and oblivious, she was hyperaware. She saw everything and cared for nothing. By the age of ten, she knew it was only a matter of time before she found a use for her talent for camouflage. By the age of twenty, her disappearing act was so quick and so automatic that she was often unaware she'd absented herself from the room. One second she was there, the next she was gone. She was a perfect companion because she mirrored the person she was with, becoming whatever they were. She was a mime and a mimic. Naturally, people liked and trusted her. She was also the ideal employee-responsible, uncomplaining, tireless, willing to do whatever was asked of her. She came to work early. She stayed late. This made her appear selfless when, in fact, she was utterly indifferent, except when it was a matter of furthering her own aims. In some ways, the subterfuge had been forced on her. Most of her siblings had managed to put themselves through school, and at this stage in their lives they appeared more successful than she. It made them feel good to help their baby sister, whose prospects were pathetic compared with their own. While she was happy to accept their largesse, she didn't like being subordinate to them. She'd found a way to make herself their equal, having acquired quite a bit of money that she kept in a secret bank account. It was better they didn't know how much her lot in life had improved. Her next older brother, the one with the law degree, was the only sibling she had any use for. He didn't want to work any harder than she did and he didn't mind bending the rules if the payoff was worthwhile. She'd borrowed an identity, becoming someone else on two previous occasions. She thought fondly of her other personas, as one would of old friends who'd moved to another state. Like a Method actor, she had a new part to play. She was now Solana Rojas and that's where her focus lay. She kept her new identity wrapped around her like a cloak, feeling safe and protected in the person she'd become. The original Solana-the one whose life she'd borrowed-was a woman she'd worked with for months in the convalescent wing of a home for seniors. The real Solana, whom she now thought of as "the Other," was an LVN. She, too, had studied to become a licensed vocational nurse. The only difference between them was that the Other was certified, while she'd had to drop out of school before she'd finished the course work. That was her father's fault. He'd died and no one had stepped forward to pay for her education. After the funeral, her mother asked her to quit school and get a job, so that was what she'd done. She found work first cleaning houses, and later as a nurse's aide, pretending to herself that she was a real LVN, which she would have been if she'd finished the program at City College. She knew how to do everything the Other did, but she wasn't as well paid because she lacked the proper credentials. Why was that fair? She'd chosen the real Solana Rojas the same way she'd chosen the others. There was a twelve-year difference in their ages, the Other being sixty-four years old to her fifty-two. Their features weren't really similar, but they were close enough for the average observer. She and the Other were roughly the same height and weight, though she knew weight was of little consequence. Women gained and lost pounds all the time, so if someone noticed the discrepancy, it was easily explained. Hair color was another insignificant trait. Hair could be any hue or shade found in a drugstore box. She'd gone from a brunette to a blonde to a redhead on previous occasions, all of which were in stark contrast to the natural gray hair she'd had since she was thirty. Over the past year, she'd darkened her hair little by little until the match with the Other was approximate. Once, a new hire at the convalescent home had mistaken the two for sisters, which had thrilled her to no end. The Other was Hispanic, which she herself was not. She could pass if she chose. Her ethnic forebears were Mediterranean; Italians and Greeks with a few Turks thrown in-olive-skinned and dark-haired, with large dark eyes. When she was in the company of Anglos, if she was quiet and went about her business, the assumption was that she didn't speak much English. This meant many conversations were conducted in her presence as though she couldn't understand a word. In truth, it was Spanish she couldn't speak. Her preparations for lifting the Other's identity had taken an abrupt turn on Tuesday of the week before. On Monday, the Other told the nursing staff she'd given two weeks' notice. Soon her classes were starting and she wanted a break before she devoted herself to school full-time. This was the signal that it was time to put her plan into operation. She needed to lift the Other's wallet because a driver's license was crucial to her scheme. Almost as soon as she thought of it, the opportunity arose. That's what life was like for her, one possibility after another presenting itself for her personal edification and advancement. She hadn't been given many advantages in life and those she had, she'd been forced to create for herself. She was in the staff lounge when the Other returned from a doctor's appointment. She'd been ill sometime before, and while her disease was in remission, she'd had frequent checkups. She told everyone her cancer was a blessing. She was more appreciative of life. Her illness had motivated her to reorder her priorities. She'd been accepted to graduate school, where she would study for an MBA in health care management. The Other hung her handbag in her locker and draped her sweater over it. There was only the one hook, as a second hook had a screw missing and dangled uselessly. The Other closed her locker and snapped shut the combination lock without turning the dial. She did this so it would be quicker and easier to pop the lock open at the end of the day. She'd waited, and when the Other had gone out to the nurse's station, she'd pulled on a pair of disposable latex gloves and given the lock a tug. It hadn't taken any time at all to open the locker, reach into the Other's bag, and remove her wallet. She'd slipped the Other's driver's license from its windowed compartment and put the wallet back, reversing herself as neatly as a strip of film. She peeled off the gloves and tucked them into the pocket of her uniform. The license she placed under the Dr. Scholl's pad in the sole of her right shoe. Not that anyone would suspect. When the Other noticed her license was gone, she'd assume she'd left it somewhere. It was always this way. People blamed themselves for being careless and absentminded. It seldom occurred to them to accuse anyone else. In this case, no one would think to point a finger at her, because she made such a point of being scrupulous in the company of others. To execute the remaining aspect of the plan, she'd waited until the Other's shift was over and the administrative staff were gone for the day. All the front offices were empty. As was usual on Tuesday nights, the office doors were left unlocked so a cleaning crew could come in. While they were hard at work, it was easy to enter and find the keys to the locked file cabinets. The keys were kept in the secretary's desk and needed only to be plucked up and put to use. No one questioned her presence, and she doubted anyone would remember later that she'd come and gone. The cleaning crew was supplied by an outside agency. Their job was to vacuum, dust, and empty the trash. What did they know about the inner workings of the convalescent wing in a senior citizens' home? As far as they were concerned-given her uniform-she was a bona fide RN, a person of status and respect, entitled to do as she pleased. She removed the application the Other had filled out when she applied for the job. This two-page form contained all the data she would need to assume her new life: date of birth, place of birth, which was Santa Teresa, Social Security number, education, the number of her nursing license, and her prior employment. She made a photocopy of the document along with the two letters of recommendation attached to the Other's file. She made copies of the Other's job evaluations and her salary reviews, feeling a flash of fury when she saw the humiliating gap between what the two of them were paid. No sense fuming about that now. She returned the paperwork to the folder and replaced the file in the drawer, which she then locked. She put the keys in the secretary's desk drawer again and left the office. 2 DECEMBER 1987 My name is Kinsey Millhone. I'm a private investigator in the small Southern California town of Santa Teresa, ninety-five miles north of Los Angeles. We were nearing the end of 1987, a year in which the Santa Teresa Police Department crime analyst logged 5 homicides, 10 bank robberies, 98 residential burglaries, 309 arrests for motor vehicle theft and 514 for shoplifting, all of this in a population of approximately 85,102, excluding Colgate on the north side of town and Montebello to the south. It was winter in California, which meant the dark began its descent at five o'clock in the afternoon. By then, house lights were popping on all over town. Gas fireplaces had been switched on and jet blue flames were curling up around the stacks of fake logs. Somewhere in town, you might've caught the faint scent of real wood burning. Santa Teresa doesn't have many deciduous trees, so we aren't subjected to the sorry sight of bare branches against the gray December skies. Lawns, leaves, and shrubberies were still green. Days were gloomy, but there were splashes of color in the landscape-the salmon and magenta bougainvillea that flourished through December and into February. The Pacific Ocean was frigid-a dark, restless gray-and the beaches fronting it were deserted. The daytime temperatures had dropped into the fifties. We all wore heavy sweaters and complained about the cold. For me, business had been slow despite the number of felonies in play. Something about the season seemed to discourage white-collar criminals. Embezzlers were probably busy Christmas shopping with the money they'd liberated from their respective company tills. Bank and mortgage frauds were down, and the telemarketing scamsters were listless and uninterested. Even divorcing spouses didn't seem to be in a battling mood, sensing perhaps that hostilities could just as easily carry over into spring. I continued to do the usual paper searches at the hall of records, but I wasn't being called upon to do much else. However, since lawsuits are always a popular form of indoor sport, I was kept busy working as a process server, for which I was registered and bonded in Santa Teresa County. The job put a lot of miles on my car, but the work wasn't taxing and netted me sufficient money to pay my bills. The lull wouldn't last long, but there was no way I could have seen what was coming. Excerpted from T Is for Trespass by Sue Grafton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
