"A" is for Alibi

"A" is for Alibi is a crime novel by the American writer Sue Grafton, published in 1982 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. It is the first book of the series about the private investigator Kinsey Millhone, and the first of the novels whose titles run through the alphabet.

Kinsey is a former police officer who left the force and opened her own one-woman agency in Santa Teresa, a Californian town where the work consists of the cases the police have finished with. She is twice divorced, keeps her possessions to a minimum and has made a habit of living without attachments, which is a sensible arrangement for someone who spends her days inside other people's families. What she does have is a preference for clients who have been treated badly, and the cases she takes tend to be the ones with no money in them.

Grafton wrote the books in the first person, so the reader gets Kinsey's judgments, her meals and her running argument with her own landlord along with the investigation, and that voice is a large part of why the series became one of the defining American detective sequences of its period.