She was a "Jane Doe," an unidentified white female whose decomposed body was discovered near a quarry off California's Highway 1. The case fell to the Santa Teresa County Sheriff's Department, but the detectives had little to go on. The woman was young, her hands were bound with a length of wire, there were multiple stab wounds, and her throat had been slashed. After months of investigation, the murder remained unsolved.That was eighteen years ago. Now the two men who found the body, both nearing the end of long careers in law enforcement, want one last shot at the case. Old and ill, they need someone to help with their legwork and they turn to Kinsey Millhone. They will, they tell her, find closure if they can just identify the victim. Kinsey is intrigued and agrees to the job.But revisiting the past can be a dangerous business, and what begins with the pursuit of Jane Doe's real identity ends in a high-risk hunt for her killer.
Q is for Quarry is the first Kinsey Millhone book that didn’t
completely hook me in. I don’t know what it was about this book. I did enjoy it
and the story was interesting. But, it kept losing me and took me a few months
to read. That could also be due to the reading slump I’ve been in lately. Maybe
a bit of both.
What I didn’t know going into it was that it’s based on a
true story. I wish I had known that from the start. I may have been more invested.
Sue Grafton added some details that
weren’t from the real story because this is a work of fiction, but she kept the
integrity of the case in tact. What’s even better is that she got involved in
trying to help solve the case. All of this was added as a note at the end of
the book.
You can pretty much get what the whole thing was about from
the synopsis. So, I’m just going to include a link where you can read about the
Jane Doe of Santa Barbara. Someone has to know who this woman is. We can only
hope it’ll get solved and she will get the justice she deserves all these years
later.
