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Bemused, beleaguered and begrimed, Southern
California's premier PI, Kinsey Millhone leaves her hometown of
Santa Teresa in an adventure (her 12th in the alphabet series)
that begins straightforwardly enough but quickly twists into a
knotted string of untruths. While getting ready for the
Thanksgiving Day wedding between a local tavern keeper and the
elder brother of her landlord, Kinsey agrees to help the family of
recently deceased neighborhood WWII vet, Johnnie Lee, find out why
the military has no record of his service. Soon after Kinsey has
finished looking (fruitlessly) through his papers, Lee's rooms are
burgled, and Ray Rawson, who claims he is an old friend recently
arrived in Santa Teresa unaware of Lee's death, is beaten up.
Kinsey soon finds herself on a plane bound for Florida, in
possession of only the clothes she's wearing and her purse( with
an extra toothbrush), trailing a young pregnant woman in
possession of a duffel bag spirited from Lee's home. On a stopover
in Dallas/Fort Worth, Kinsey sleuths disguised as a hotel maid
dusting baseboards ("tough to picture the boy detectives doing
this," she reflects), meets the increasingly unreliable Rawson
again and encounters yet another figure from Lee's past, a
violent, vengeful psychopath. While gradually sorting out the
connections among this cast, Kinsey travels to Louisville, where
Rawson's 80-something mother proves her mettle and Kinsey,
determining that lawless, in this case, is neither adjective nor
collective noun, unravels a decades-old mystery.
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