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S Is for Silence (Hardcover)

by Sue Grafton (Author) "When Liza Mellincamp thinks about the last time she ever saw Violet Sullivan, what comes most vividly to mind is the color of Violet's Japanese..." (more)

4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

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Product Details

Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Macmillan (May 5 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1405052759
ISBN-13: 978-1405052757
Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 14.4 x 3.6 cm
Shipping Weight: 622 g

Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

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This is item 19 in The Kinsey Millhone Alphabet Mystery Series.

Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Kinsey Millhone has kept her appeal by being distinctive and sympathetic without craving center stage. While some mysteries that provide the PI's shoe size or most despised food create a forced and intrusive intimacy, a master like Grafton makes the relationship relaxed and reassuring. Millhone's life is modest and familiar, though her love life, now featuring police detective Cheney Phillips, tends to be oddly remote. This 19th entry (after 2004's R Is for Ricochet) adopts a new convention: Millhone's customary intelligent and occasionally self-deprecating first-person reportage is interrupted by vignettes from the days surrounding the Fourth of July, 34 years earlier, when a hot-blooded young woman named Violet Sullivan disappeared. Violet's daughter, Daisy, who was seven at the time, hires Millhone to discover her mother's true fate. Violet had toyed with every man in town at one time or another, so there's no shortage of scandalous secrets and possible suspects. Constant revelations concerning several absorbing characters allow a terrific tension to build. However, the utterly illogical and oddly abrupt ending undermines what is otherwise one of the stronger offerings in this iconic series. One million first printing; Literary Guild, BOMC and Mystery Guild main selection. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From AudioFile

In her nineteenth mystery, Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton's no-nonsense gumshoe, takes on a cold case--the question of what happened to a shady lady who disappeared 30 years earlier. In a refreshing change in the alphabet series, Grafton alternates between Millhone's first-person point of view and third-person flashbacks that depict the life of the missing woman in 1953. The device works well, especially for narrator Judy Kaye, Kinsey's alter ego on audio, who capably goes beyond the first-person narrative. Some stalwarts of the series may be unhappy that there's less of Kinsey than usual, but Grafton's approach gives the audiobook a bit more complexity than its predecessors. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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First Sentence
When Liza Mellincamp thinks about the last time she ever saw Violet Sullivan, what comes most vividly to mind is the color of Violet's Japanese silk kimono, a shade of blue that Liza later learned was called "cerulean," a word that wasn't even in her vocabulary when she was fourteen years old. Read the first page

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Customer Reviews

6 Reviews

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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4.0 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars The Hard-Boiled-Egg Legacy of Violet, Oct 3 2006

By	Linda G. Shelnutt "Author" (Hotchkiss, CO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: S Is For Silence (Hardcover)

Using a crisp, biting, time-warp prologue (or first chapter acting as a prologue) is a classic way of opening a P.I. mystery. I admire the heck out of the juicy artistic feel of this opening style, yet I generally have a hard time getting into a story with any type of preliminary literary shenanigan which doesn't sit me right down into an ongoing, "right-now" narrative. So, yes, I had a resistance to overcome prior to reading "S," even though I had read compulsively from "A" through "R."

I slid fairly easily into Kinsey's "I am a..." intro in chapter 2, with the bar/lunch scene in which Millhone reluctantly met her client over a "to drool for," scrumptiously described grilled kaiser roll with salami and pepper-cheese, fried-egg, innards. The melted white cheese infused with red-pepper-flakes definitely hot glued me onto a bar stool along with the characters. The usual Quarter Pounder with cheese would have worked, too, but, for whatever reasons, Kinsey somehow got the gourmet bug in "S."

Once the flow of the flashback chapters seated into the flow of the "I-Kinsey" narrative, I noticed that the Third Person narratives were deeply engrossing as well as intriguingly and stylishly written. I would certainly understand if Grafton had an itch to explore moods and thought patterns inside-the-heads of characters with varying degrees of anti-heroic traits, who would be vastly divergent from Kinsey in behavioral motivation and rationalization techniques. With tremendous panache, Grafton painted these rich psychological portraits from "inside-the-hearts-of-sinners-and-saints," and she blended them so seamlessly into the 1987 reality that I began to lose track of the 30-yr-cultural-gap, even though the 50's icons, idioms, and inlets-to-the-past were firmly crayoned into each July 1953 chapter.

Though some of the facts uncovered held a dark horror more like King's work than Grafton's, and though that ambiance was released abruptly, I felt no let down with the ending, and possibly the forewarning in the reports helped me there. The full circle, yummy symbolism of the kimono and the kaiser roll was awesome.

"S" is more a work of literary art, a true and classic novel with an experimental edge in the narrative machinations of the psychological profiling chapters, than it is a standard offering of detective fiction, though, for me, it also satisfied the cravings of that genre. After the plot signed off, I was left with a compulsion to reread several parts, then with a desire to reread the whole, cover to cover. This book has too much psychological pith to get it all in a single run through (given a challenged memory bank like mine).

The epilogue left me with the peaceful, haunting essence of the first sight of cherry blossoms after an extended, bone chilling winter.

Only one question remained for me as I closed the book:

Sue has many times earned the most exquisite, leading-edge, oil-painting renditions of the thematic essence of each of her books. So. Why is one of the classiest, most astute and revered publishing houses putting out Sue Grafton's phenomenal series with no artwork on the book-jackets?

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2.0 out of 5 stars Am I the only one who didn't get it?, Sep 19 2006

By	Wellread "Carolyn" (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: S Is For Silence (Hardcover)

I have read and enjoyed all of the alphabet so far, but I believe that Sue Grafton is getting bored and she is testing her readers to see if we are really taking any notice of what she is writing. Am I the only reader who thought the ending didn't make any sense whatsoever? I thought I must have missed a chapter by mistake and I read over most of the book again to try to make the connection but I couldn't. Of course I can't give away the ending so I can't specify the most illogical aspect of the story, but how would that last item that she pursues stand up in even an imaginary courtroom as any kind of evidence that the person involved was responsible for anything. Sue, you are running out of steam. Where is the evolvement of Kinsey's private life? It has moved along a little in previous books but it has now come to a standstill. I fear that my alphabet ends at 'S'. I have always waited impatiently for the next book but at the end of "Silence" I feel no desire to look for 'T'.

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Cold Case Solution Is Unearthed, Jul 15 2006

By	Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews (#1 REVIEWER)

This review is from: S is for Silence (Paperback)

Solving a cold case is extremely challenging for a detective. Writing about solving a cold case is even tougher. You can easily get so caught up in unraveling the tattered mystery that you bore your readers silly. A particularly tricky task is to make readers care.

Sue Grafton has written one of the most satisfying cold case stories that I've ever read. She makes the missing person, Violet Sullivan, both sympathetic and off-the-wall. At the same time, Ms. Grafton shows how an unsolved disappearance leaves everyone who cared about the person wounded to the core. They are victims too. In the case of S Is for Silence, some of the victims are more sympathetic than others . . . but they are all interesting.

The book mainly succeeds because Ms. Grafton creates an interesting series of characters and plot interactions both in her flashback chapters and in her development of Kinsey's investigation.

Ms. Grafton wisely keeps the investigation short. The mystery is unraveled in five days. To have strung the investigation out would have made the book boring, in my judgment. I was very impressed to find that the flashback information wasn't a direct hint as to how Kinsey would solve the mystery. She followed her own unique path.

Those who like to focus on Kinsey and her life as a single woman won't find this book very satisfying. The cold case is the story. Kinsey's friends and family have barely cameo roles in this book.

For those who like a classic missing person's story against the backdrop of volatile relationships in a small California town, this book will, however, be the right stuff.

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Most recent customer reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars one of her better books
I've been reading this series from the beginning, so by habit I picked up this one and I'm happy I did. Read more

Published on Mar 27 2006

3.0 out of 5 stars Time to move Kinsey forward 20 years,
Does Sue Grafton ever curse her publishers (and herself) for promising a 26-volume series? By setting this book twenty years ago, in 1986, Grafton limits her possibilities. Read more

Published on Mar 9 2006 by Justin Reding

5.0 out of 5 stars Best to date
This is the best Millhone mystery novel Grafton has written yet. Chock full of suspense and thrills. Read more

Published on Jan 2 2006