"U" Is for Undertow
1st edition cover
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| Author | Sue Grafton |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Alphabet Mysteries |
| Genre | Mystery |
| Published | 2009 (G.P. Putnam's Sons) |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 416 pp (first edition) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 311777740 |
| Preceded by | "T" Is for Trespass |
| Followed by | "V" Is for Vengeance |
"U" Is for Undertow is the 21st novel in Sue Grafton's "Alphabet" series of mystery novels and features Kinsey Millhone, a private eye based in Santa Teresa, California. The novel, set in 1988, finds Kinsey investigating the disappearance of a 4-year-old girl in 1967 and the narrative weaves between both time periods. The novel has reached the top position on several best-seller lists.
In April 1988, Kinsey Millhone is hired by a young man named Michael Sutton to investigate a memory that he claims to have recovered of two people burying a body in the woods in the exclusive Horton Ravine neighborhood in 1967, when he turned six years old. He claims that the burial took place on his birthday, two days after a famous unsolved kidnapping of a four-year-old named Mary Claire in the neighborhood, in which the kidnappers requested $25,000 but never picked up the ransom after police were called. She was never found. Although Michael's memory is hazy, he and Kinsey manage to locate the spot of the burial, but a police dig uncovers only the body of a wolfdog named Ulf. One of the bystanders watching the dig, a banker named Walker McNally, who was a high school classmate of Kinsey, spends the entire weekend drinking and kills a young woman in a DUI on Sunday night.
Kinsey learns that Sutton was involved in a past "recovered memory" event that proved false, while greatly disrupting his family. Bothered by this, Kinsey traces the dogtag back to the dog's owner, who told her that the dog had been euthanized around that time. No one has any idea how the remains ended up in Horton Ravine. Upon returning to Horton Ravine to talk to the neighbors, Kinsey learns that Rain, the four-year-old granddaughter/adopted daughter of the couple that formerly owned the lot, had been kidnapped in a similar fashion just before Mary Claire but was returned unharmed after her parents paid a ransom of $15,000 using marked bills, which also never turned up.
A parallel story set in the 1960s is initially told from the viewpoint of Deborah Unruh, Rain's grandmother. Greg, the Unruhs' son, returned home with his pregnant girlfriend Shelly after dropping out of college in 1963. Five days after she gave birth to their daughter Rain, they left, leaving the baby behind. Two years later, the Unruhs formally adopted Rain. Two years after that, in 1967, Greg and Shelly (now calling themselves Creed and Destiny) returned to borrow $40,000 against Greg's trust, but the Unruhs refused to make such a loan. Greg and Shelly left unexpectedly not long thereafter. Almost immediately after they left, Rain was kidnapped.
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