D Is for Deadbeat

D Is for Deadbeat is the fourth novel in Sue Grafton's series about the private investigator Kinsey Millhone. It was published in 1987 and takes place in the imaginary California city where the series is set.

Millhone introduces herself in the series as a woman who works alone: female, single and self-employed, with a constitutional inability to work for anybody else, and a purist about justice who will nonetheless lie whenever it helps. In this book she is hired by a man calling himself Alvin Limardo for work that appears to be simple, and the arrangement falls apart when his cheque comes back. His name was really John Dagett, and by the time Millhone has established that, he has drowned in a death the police are treating as an accident. Dagett had been in prison, had a habit of lying and was drinking heavily, and her attempts to establish what happened to him turn up a substantial list of people who had reason to dislike him.

The Grafton novels are written in Millhone's own voice and set in the 1980s, and the series moves forward a year at a time from one book to the next while its heroine works cases on her own.