"Of #1 New York Times-bestselling author Sue Grafton, NPR's Maureen Corrigan said, "Makes me wish there were more than 26 letters." With only two letters left, Grafton's many devoted readers will share that sentiment. X: The number ten. An unknown quantity. A mistake. A cross. A kiss. X: The shortest entry in Webster's Unabridged. Derived from Greek and Latin and commonly found in science, medicine, and religion. The most graphically dramatic...

When Dowan Purcell, a respected physician who operates a nursing home, disappears, his ex-wife hires PI Kinsey Millhone to look onto it.

Reba Lafferty was a daughter of privilege, the only child of an adoring father. Nord Lafferty was already in his fifties when Reba was born, and he could deny her nothing. Over the years, he quietly settled her many scrapes with the law, but he wasn't there for her when she was convicted of embezzlement and sent to the California Institute for Women. Now, at thirty-two, she is about to be paroled, having served twenty-two months of a four-year sentence....

A woman with a murky past who kills herself - or was it murder? A dying old man cared for by the son he pummeled mercilessly. A lovely woman whose life is about to splinter into a thousand fragments. A professional shoplifting ring racking up millions in stolen goods, and the spider at the center of the web. And Kinsey Millhone, whose thirty-eighth birthday gift is a punch in the face that leaves her with two black eyes and a busted nose.

"The darkest and most disturbing case report from the files of Kinsey Millhone, Y is for Yesterday begins in 1979, when four teenage boys from an elite private school sexually assault a fourteen-year-old classmate--and film the attack. Not long after, the tape goes missing and the suspected thief, a fellow classmate, is murdered. In the investigation that follows, one boy turns state's evidence and two of his peers are convicted. But the ringleader...

Fans have been fed short rations when it comes to Kinsey Millhone's past. We know of the aunt who raised her, the second husband who left her, the long lost family up the California coast. But husband number one, vice-cop Mickey Magruber, remained a mystery - until now. The call came from a guy who scavenges defaulted storage units and came up with a box of documents about her. Curious, she hands over a twenty and amid childhood memorabilia finds...

Kinsey investigates two seemingly unrelated deaths--the first of a local, shady private investigator, the second a John Doe on the beach.