Book ~ "Q is for Quarry" (2002) Sue Grafton

From Goodreads ~ She was a "Jane Doe," an unidentified white female whose decomposed body was discovered near a quarry off California's Highway 1. The case fell to the Santa Teresa County Sheriff's Department but the detectives had little to go on. The woman was young, her hands were bound with a length of wire, there were multiple stab wound, and her throat had been slashed. After months of investigation, the murder remained unsolved.

That was eighteen years ago. Now the two men who found the body, both nearing the end of long careers in law enforcement, want one last shot at the case. Old and ill, they need someone to help with their legwork and they turn to Kinsey Millhone. They will, they tell her, find closure if they can just identify the victim. Kinsey is intrigued and agrees to the job.

But revisiting the past can be a dangerous business, and what begins with the pursuit of Jane Doe's real identity ends in a high-risk hunt for her killer.

It's the late 1980s and Kinsey Millhone is a 37-year-old private detective in Santa Teresa, CA.  She is contacted by Con Dolan, a police officer and friend, to help him and his former partner, Stacey Oliphant, solve a murder from 18 years earlier.  A young girl had been found murdered and they couldn't figure out who this Jane Doe was.  Both men are getting old and aren't in the best of health and would like to have closure on this cold case.

With the few clues they have, they figure out who the girl was (lots of legwork and luck) and then start working on who killed her, which could have been many people in the small town the girl was from.

I thought this story was just okay.  It wasn't overly exciting and I found it hard to keep track of all the characters at times.  It's written in first person perspective in Kinsey's voice.   I found it ended rather quickly and would have liked a bit more of a wrap-up.  As a head's up, there is swearing.

This is the seventeenth in the "alphabet series" featuring Kinsey Millhone.  Though it is part of a series, it works as a stand alone.  I discovered this series in the mid-1990s and have read them all.  I started rereading them last year.  With the author's recent death, Y is for Yesterday will be the end of the series.