U Is for Undertow - by Sue Grafton (Paperback)

About the Book

"It's April, 1988, a month before Kinsey Millhone's thirty-eighth birthday, and she's alone in her office doing paperwork when a young man arrives unannounced. He has a preppy air about him and looks as if he'd be carded if he tried to buy booze, but Michael Sutton is twenty-seven, an unemployed college dropout. Twenty-one years earlier, a four-year-old girl disappeared. A recent reference to her kidnapping has triggered a flood of memories. Sutton now believes he stumbled on her lonely burial when he was six years old. He wants Kinsey's help in locating the child's remains and finding the men who killed her. It s a long shot but he's willing to pay cash up front, and Kinsey agrees to give him one day"--

Book Synopsis

Sue Grafton takes the mystery genre to new heights with this twisting, complex #1 New York Times bestseller that draws private investigator Kinsey Millhone into a case shrouded in the sins of the past.

Looking solemn, Michael Sutton arrives in Kinsey Millhone's office with a story to tell. When he was six, he says, he wandered into the woods and saw two men digging a hole. They claimed they were pirates, looking for buried treasure. Now, all these years later, the long-forgotten events have come back to him--and he has pieced them together with news reports from the time, becoming convinced that he witnesses the burial of a kidnapped child.

Kinsey has nearly nothing to go on. Sutton doesn't even know where he was that day--and, she soon discovers, he has a history of what might generously be called an active imagination. Despite her doubts, Kinsey sets out to track down the so-called burial site. And what's found there pulls her into a hidden current of deceit stretching back more than twenty years...

Review Quotes

Praise for U is for Undertow

"Has this reliable series lost its addictive appeal? Not at all."--Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

"Arresting prose...[a] brilliantly inventive novel."--Richmond Times-Dispatch

"Makes me wish there were more than twenty-six letters at her disposal."--Maureen Corrian, NPR.org

"Her most structurally complex, psychologically potent book to date."--Los Angeles Times

More Praise for Sue Grafton and the Alphabet Series

"I'm going to miss Kinsey Millhone. Ever since the first of Sue Grafton's Alphabet mysteries, A Is For Alibi, came out in 1982, Kinsey has been a good friend and the very model of an independent woman, a gutsy Californian P.I. rocking a traditional man's job...it's Kinsey herself who keeps this series so warm and welcoming. She's smart, she's resourceful, and she's tough enough to be sensitive on the right occasions."--New York Times Book Review

"The consistent quality and skillful innovations in this alphabet series justify all the praise these books have received over the past 35 years."--Wall Street Journal

"A superb storyteller."--Publishers Weekly

"Grafton's endless resourcefulness in varying her pitches in this landmark series, graced by her trademark self-deprecating humor, is one of the seven wonders of the genre."--Kirkus Reviews

"Grafton is a writer of many strengths--crisp characterizations, deft plotting, and eloquent dialogue among them--and she has kept her long-running alphabet mystery series fresh and each new release more welcome than the last."--Louisville Courier-Journal

"[Grafton's] ability to give equal weight to the story of the detective and the detective story sets her apart in the world of crime fiction."--Richmond Times-Dispatch

About the Author

#1 New York Times bestselling author Sue Grafton first introduced Kinsey Millhone in the Alphabet Series in 1982. Soon after, both writer and heroine became icons and international bestsellers. Ms. Grafton was a writer who consistently broke the bonds of genre while never writing the same book twice. Named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, her awards and honors included the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, the Ross Macdonald Literary Award, the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award from Britain's Crime Writers' Association, the Lifetime Achievement Award from Malice Domestic, a Lifetime Achievement Award from Bouchercon, three Shamus Awards, and three Anthony Awards--including the first two ever awarded. She passed away in December 2017.