A tough-talking former cop, private investigator Kinsey Millhone has set up a modest detective agency in a quiet corner of Santa Teresa, California. A twice-divorced loner with few personal possessions and fewer personal attachments, she's got a soft spot for underdogs and lost causes. That's why she draws desperate clients like Nikki Fife. Eight years ago, she was convicted of killing her philandering husband. Now she's out on parole and needs Kinsey's...

Twenty-three-year-old Bobby Callahan is lucky to be alive after a car forced his Porsche over a bridge and into a canyon. The crash left Bobby with a clouded memory. But he can't shake the feeling it was no random accident and that he's still in danger. The only clues Kinsey has to go on are a little red address book and the name "Blackman." Bobby can't remember who he gave the address book to for safekeeping. And any chances of Bobby regaining his...

It was the silly season and a Monday at that, and Kinsey Millhone was bogged down in a preliminary report on a fire claim. Something was nagging at her, but she couldn't pin it. The last thing she needed in the morning mail was a letter from her bank recording an erroneous $5,000 deposit in her account. Kinsey had never believed in Santa Claus and she wasn't about to change her mind now. Resigning herself to a morning of frustration, she phoned the...

Hired to bring a woman's mother back from the Mojave desert, female investigator Kinsey Millhone returns to unearth a gruesome, long-buried secret and make the top billing of Tyrone Patty's hit list.

When Morley Shine, a fellow PI, dies from a heart attack, Kinsey Millhone takes over the seemingly simple task of gathering evidence for Lonnie Kingman, a local attorney immersed in a civil suit. Stakes are high. David Birney, acquitted of his wealthy wife's murder five years ago, got his hands on her fortune. Now Kingman wants to divest Birney of the money in favor of the wife's child by an earlier marriage. But the statute of limitations has about...

Lorna Kepler was beautiful and willful, a loner who couldn't resist flirting with danger. Maybe that's what killed her. The cops suspected homicide, but they could find neither motive nor suspect. The case was gradually shifted to the back burner and became another unsolved file. Only Lorna's mother kept it alive, consumed by the certainty that somebody out there had gotten away with murder. And so Kinsey Millhone is pulled into the netherworld of...

PI Kinsey Millhone is hired by three brothers to find a fourth who, it appears from their father's will, was not disinherited after all when he walked out on the family, and is entitled to $5 million. Kinsey finds him working as a janitor in a church, but no is he sooner found, than he is killed. Kinsey has more work to do.

"Let's talk about Kinsey's past. We know of the aunt who raised her, the second husband who left her, and her long-lost family up the California coast. But what about Kinsey's husband number one? He was always a blip on the radar--until now. Kinsey receives a call from a random guy who scavenges defaulted storage units at auction. Last week, he bought a stack of boxes--and Kinsey's name turned up in them. For thirty bucks, Kinsey buys the lot and...

Eighteen years after the body of an unidentified young woman is discovered in a quarry off California's Highway 1, two police detectives nearing retirement enlist Kinsey Millhone's aid to help identify the long-ago murder victim.

Thirty-four years ago, Violet Sullivan put on her party finery and left for the annual Fourth of July fireworks display. She was never seen again. In the small California town of Serena Station, tongues wagged. Some said she'd run off with a lover. Some said she was murdered by her husband. But for the not-quite-seven-year-old daughter Daisy that she left behind, her absence has never been explained or forgotten. Now, thirty-four years later, she...