J Is for Judgment (Kinsey Millhone, #10)

by Sue Grafton

[readingwithwrin]

"The hard thing about death is that nothing ever changes. The hard thing about life is that nothing stays the same."

During Blogmas 2017 I decided to challenge myself to read 5 books from the year I was born (1993). J is for Judgment was one of the books I choose.

Going into this book, I wasn't really sure what to expect. I knew Sue Grafton is an extremely popular author which is partially why I choose one of her books for this challenge, but besides that, I don't know anything about her writing style or this series in particular.

I was really looking forward to this book, not only was it a book written in the 90's but it also has a women P.I. who also seemed to be well respected in what she was doing!

J is for Judgment followed Kinsey who is working for California Fidelity as a Private Investigator and is supposed to find out if a man is really dead or not. Kinsey learns all about the crimes he committed and how it affected everyone in his life. This part I found really interesting and I wish there had been more of this in the book. I wanted to know how his wife had managed to make things work with raising two sons, a husband who is now missing/dead, and a ton of people angry at them for what he did. Instead, we got a lot of side stories, and a lot of just filler it seemed.

Kinsey is one of those characters that I truly did try and want to like, but the more we got to know her the less I really cared for her. I'm not exactly sure why either. She was smart and well respected, but for some reason, I just couldn't ever fully like her. (Does anyone else feel this way?)

Truthfully this book just wasn't for me. Normally I like all the little side stories in books, but with this one I just found myself getting annoyed with them. I was never able to really care about any of the characters, and truthfully half of them I couldn't stand by the end of the book. As of right now, I don't plan on continuing on with this series, but I am glad I did give it a try.

While this book wasn't for me, I can see why at the time a lot of people liked it. But I'm not sure it's going to be one that continues to age well as even more time goes on.