P is for Pointless

I have a confession to make. When I travel, I often like to buy $7.99 mass market paperback mysteries and read them as fast as I can. This weekend, since Chris and I traveled to the Bay Area to visit his folks for Easter, was a perfect opportunity to do just that.

At the airport, I paid my dutiful $8.08 for a novel by Sue Grafton called P is for Peril. It had all the makings of a great vacation read: murder, romance, divorce, mistaken identity, and interior design. To sum up using a perfectly cliche phrase, nothing was as it seemed. But once I got to the end, I never wanted to read another Sue Grafton novel ever again.

I wasn't expecting much; a simple who-done-it was all I wanted. But what good is a who-done-it if you come to the end and still don't know? Thankfully I hadn't invested a lot of time in it, but still. I was seriously annoyed.

Quickly thereafter, I decide to poke around online and see if I was the only one who felt this way. My google searches took me to countless websites where people confessed their disappointment:

• "After reading the last chapter, I actually tried to return this because I thought there were pages missing."
• "I have no idea who murdered Dowan Purcell. HELP!!!!!!"
• "Are Anica and Crystal lovers?"
• "Wait. So there was a hospital cover up, right? Who takes the fall?"
• Was anyone else totally confused at the end?"
• "This book is two revisions and one chapter short of being publishable. Who was the editor?"

Feeling redeemed and much better about my reading comprehension skills, I mentioned the debacle to a friend at work.

"Oh I love Sue Grafton," he said.

He then went searching through his desk and showed me a picture of the two of them at an author signing. "She's a really nice lady."

"Oh, jeez," I said. "I can't hate this woman. She's the real life Jessica Fletcher."

"She totally is! Give the girl another shot," he smiled. "No pun intended."

I now find myself in the midst of another crisis: Do I give her another chance? Or move on to Jonathan Kellerman?