When an elderly neighbour has a fall and requires home nursing his only living relative, a niece who lives across country, asks investigator Kinsey Millhone to do a background check on the only viable candidate. The check comes back clean but it soon becomes apparent that something isn’t quite right and Kinsey decides to take a closer look at the hired help.
A little digging finds that the neighbour’s bank accounts are slowly being cleared and his valuables sold off. She reports her findings to both the niece and local social workers but nobody will believe her, especially after the nurse claims harassment and takes out a restraining order against her.
Worried about the neighbour’s safety (and knowing the accusations against her are false) she continues her investigation until she unearths the terrible truth. The woman posing as a nurse has used a string of stolen identities to ingratiate herself with elderly patients who all die with their assets missing and no sign of the hired help ever again.
With a little help from a former victim’s family she rescues the neighbour but in doing so incurs the murderous attention of the nurse. After a life threatening confrontation all resolves as it should.
Sometimes you just want the comfort of familiar things-at those times I like to read Grafton’s alphabet series. The characters are familiar, the plots reliably entertaining and the writing style easy to relax into. And this episode was, I think, the best in the series so far.
The antagonist was sneaky, conniving and intelligent. The plot was strong on suspense but still had its humorous moments. The regular characters were developed without that progress intruding on the main storyline.
This story left me looking forward to the next instalment in the series.-Lynn
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