For some reason -- I think it was the end of the 4th of July festivities and travelling and working -- I found myself needing to relax and plow through a good mystery novel. This was a good mystery novel. I don’t think I’ve read any of this series since back around D or F or something, but it was pretty easy to pick up where I left off. Grafton has really mastered the art of sequence. Her stories stand alone well yet, like X-Files episodes, they each add a little to the overall picture, if you’re into that sort of thing. Her female detective is likable, fallible and not anyone’s bad stereotype of what a lady detective should be. By the time I’d read through three of them in a week or so, their plots ran together a bit, but I wanted to give a shout-out to the genre and to Grafton as a consumate master of it.