O is for Outlaw: 12/17/07

When the Nattie Challenge blog announced the ">Baby Steps Challenge" of reading three books by the end of the year, I felt ready to tackle a few more of the alphabet series. I'm reading M, N, and O for this challenge.

A phone call from a storage bin bidder brings Kinsey Millhone face to face with the memories of her first husband and their failed marriage. Mickey Magruder is in a coma at the UCLA Medical Center and the Los Angeles police Kinsey had something to do with it.

Rather than leave things alone, Kinsey starts investigating Magruder's shooting pro bono, putting herself and her license at risk. Kinsey is the outlaw in O is for Outlaw.

A huge pile of debt, a seedy bar and a Vietnam war secret are at the heart of this mystery. Unfortunately these are all the elements of a typical ratings sweep episode of Magnum PI. The Vietnam piece of this mystery felt forced. I know that Kinsey is living in the mid to late 1980s but that still puts more than a decade between her present and the tour of duty where the original crime took place.

O is for Outlaw reminded me why I stopped reading this series in the first place. Kinsey's quirky personal life is supposed to make her interesting but she comes off as annoying and oft-times clueless when she's supposed to be a crack detective. She hasn't grown at all as a character in the course of these fifteen books. She's just as stuck in her ways and just as defective as she was in A is for Alibi.

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