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Sue Grafton provides excerpt from U is for Undertow on her website
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Sue Grafton has obliged her eternally curious fans by placing an excerpt from U is for Undertow, the 21st title in her Kinsey Millhone mystery series – sometimes known as the Alphabet series – on her website. The title is scheduled for a December 1, 2009 release.
Grafton's Penguin Group publishers provide this summary of the novel:
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. As her investigation unfolds, she discovers Michael Sutton has an uneasy relationship with the truth. In essence, he’s the boy who cried wolf. Is his current story true or simply one more in a long line of fabrications?
Grafton's excerpt from her novel provides additional details. The child who disappeared was Mary Claire Fitzhugh. Kinsey remembers the year of Mary Claire's disappearance, 1967, because Kinsey herself had just graduated from high school then. Mary Claire's kidnappers demanded a ransom, which the Fitzhughs paid; but the money was never picked up.
Grafton discusses U is for Undertow in the YouTube video below, recorded as part of Borders Presents. She adds to what her readers know about her upcoming publication by mentioning that the story involves two rich kids, just out of high school, who cook up a scheme in 1967 that has tragic consequences. The two vow to be silent forever about the incident, but Michael Sutton's disclosure causes things to start unraveling. Grafton also adds that a secondary plot of the novel features Kinsey's relatives, who were introduced in J is for Judgment.
Grafton responds to those readers who constantly ask how she plans to end her series by saying she has about ten more years before she has to deal with that issue. She says that it is Kinsey Millhone, her central character, who determines the plot. "I don't tell her; she tells me," Grafton explains, adding, "She gives me information on a need-to-know basis, and right now I don't need to know. She assures me."
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