What is A Is for Alibi about?

Kinsey Millhone is a private investigator in Santa Teresa, California — Grafton's fictionalized Santa Barbara — recently divorced for the second time and living alone in a small apartment she describes with genuine affection. She is hired by a woman named Nikki Fife, just released from prison after serving time for poisoning her divorce attorney husband. Nikki wants to know who actually did it. Kinsey starts pulling at the thread, and finds that a man as dislikable as the murdered Laurence Fife left a remarkable number of people who wanted him dead.

The novel is fundamentally about Kinsey's character as a mode of living. She is methodical, self-reliant, and deliberately uncomplicated in a world that keeps trying to complicate her. She has two divorces, no close family, a Volkswagen Bug, and a converted garage apartment she finds adequate. Grafton doesn't write this as tragedy or eccentricity — Kinsey's stripped-down life is presented as a chosen architecture, a way of keeping the signal clear. The investigation proceeds through interviews, records, and legwork, not through intuition or dramatic revelation.

Grafton was writing against the Agatha Christie tradition, which she openly disliked, and the Philip Marlowe tradition, which she adapted rather than repeated. Kinsey is tough without being hard, professional without being cold, and attracted to a man in the case without losing her judgment. The novel introduced an alphabet series that would eventually reach "Y" — Grafton died in 2017 before completing "Z" — but the character and the world are established here in full.

This is a fairly short, efficiently plotted mystery that delivers what it promises. It is not the deepest entry in the series — later books are richer. But readers who appreciate a first-person detective voice that trusts the reader, and a setting rendered in specific sensory detail, will find it a satisfying and quick read. Anyone hoping for a literary reinvention of the form will need to look elsewhere.