I’ve always pictured her as plain, but I’d be ok with “Great-Looking If She Made Even A Little Effort…”
(spoiler: she never makes Even A Little Effort)
.
Except for that one scene in Z is for Zeppelin.
Sigh… I wish.
Maura Tierney, a young athletic Maura Tierney. She is plain/pretty in an all-American girl way, she looks intelligent, a real person, not concerned with hair/nails/shoes or mooning after men. Kinsey liked men, but she was practical, focussed, and sensible about life and content to follow her own path.
How about Codie Smulders?
excellent choice! (Her name is Jacoba, ‘Cobie’ is short for that, I always wondered)
And she did plain (and tough) on that detective show she did recently.
That’s not bad at all. If not her, use one of the Mara sisters. To me, they could be triplets.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard her described as plain before this thread. I think she’s well past the plain mark, even playing a PTSD plagued low level private eye.
Just out of curiosity, has A&E ever had a well known actress in a show? I haven’t had cable in a long time so I really have no idea. I thought they had pretty well went the reality tv route.
She cuts her own hair (in the book), doesn’t wear makeup, has one dress. Wears jeans and turtleneck sweaters. Doesn’t mean she’s ‘plain’, or not pretty, but she’s more of an athletic tomboy, as mentioned.
I don’t think this is a good description. The only athletic thing she does is run. Unless eating quarter pounders is athletic. It’s not like she uses physical feats to overpower the bad guys. And if wearing pants and shirt is a sign of being a tomboy, I would guess that 95% of women are tomboys. To me she just seems like the women you run into every day, working, shopping etc.
Surprised to hear you think “E” was a clunker, it’s one of my favorites.
The plot was just too convoluted.
Summary
There’s a conspiracy to frame Kinsey by a disparate bunch of people, from her ex-husband to a former employer to feuding members of a corrupt business family. Mixed in among the conspirators is a serial killer / bomber who is presumably not a part of the plot to frame Kinsey, and who thus should be unaware of her investigation into clearing her name. Yet he also then gets in on the action in an unlikely way, seeming to magically have knowledge of Kinsey’s investigation even though he wasn’t the initial target. It all seemed too convoluted and had too many coincidences to be enjoyable. I also didn’t like that whole thing started off with the villains having various personal grudges against Kinsey. Yes, Gumshoe had a hitman trying to kill her, but that was just business, and none of the other novels** have that particular twist.
** I haven’t read Yesterday yet, but I assume that won’t be an issue.
Sounds like you’re describing my Hungarian grandmother. Too bad she’s been dead for 40 years.
I can still remember how bummed I was when I heard Grafton died. I’m a completist and was happily waiting for Z. I read A because I saw a short article on it just after it was published, so I’ve been a fan from the jump. I was enticed into reading it because of the murder ‘weapon’ (I remember an old Vincent Price movie where he killed his wife the same way), plus I liked how she said she was sublimating (my word) her anger over a recent divorce and decided to purge the anger by writing a book where she “killed” him in a book instead of doing it IRL.
As someone above said, I always pictured Kinsey looking Grafton in her first dust jacket photos.
See post 9.
I guess I either hadn’t seen it that way, or it just didn’t bother me that much. I liked that Kinsey was working to clear her own self of suspicion rather than just taking a paying case, I liked that we got more information about Kinsey’s past personal life, I liked the sense throughout the book of her being at loose ends without her usual supporting cast available to her. As far as the mystery elements go
It didn’t have a “conspiracy” feel to me, it was one man’s plot (Terry Kohler) to get revenge on a family that he felt betrayed him, and he just needed help from an insurance insider that would require a fall guy of that helper’s choosing, which turned out to be Kinsey. He knew plenty because Kinsey talked to him freely, and because he bugged his brother-in-law’s office. There was a side plot about the murder he did within the company in the past, but that ended up being a red herring, which I have no problem with.
Whatever, YMMV.
Replying to people saying that they picture Kinsey as average / plain: I posted this above.
It’s in P is for Peril that she meets a man in his 80s who keeps staring at her curiously. Later she finds out that he worked for her mother’s family, and without knowing her name he’s recognized her right away because of the unmistakable resemblance to her mother.
Maybe I should re-read it.
I had a different understanding of the mystery, that being that there were two unrelated mysteries that just so happened to involve people who ran in the same circles. The first was the Daniel Wade, Andy Motyka, and the younger Wood siblings (Ash, Olive, and Bass - Daniel’s lover). This group is the conspiracy group, and were responsible for the fire at the factory, the insurance fraud, the bugging of Kinsey’s home and the office of the oldest brother, Lance Wood, and the framing of Kinsey and Lance for all that. None of those people knew anything about Terry Kohler, who just so happened to be a psychopathic bomber in their midst. The flip side is that (at least as far as I could gather) Terry Kohler knew nothing about the factory fire being a an insurance fraud scam, or about the bugs planted in the office of Lance Wood and at Kinsey’s home, or that a jealous former colleague and bitter ex-husband wanted to frame Kinsey for a crime, since he wasn’t involved in any of that. It just so happened that in her investigation of the former mystery, Kinsey uncovered evidence of Kohler’s previous crimes, and so he tried to kill her.
At least that was my reading of the situation. And yes, my taste is the opposite as far as the supporting cast. That’s why Innocent (when William was first introduced), Ricochet, and Wasted, are among my favorites. Most of the supporting cast make appearances in those books, and that makes me happy 
.
Oh, I love the supporting cast and Innocent is one of my favorites as well, in part because of William. I also like when the other of Henry’s sibs are around, the Kinsey aunts and cousins, Vera, Deitz, and heck, even Ed the cat. But the absence of them gives Evidence an overall mood of unease that I think suits the story well.
As for the plot of Evidence, yes, I think you misunderstood what was going on (which I guess would be a result of something being too convoluted):
Terry Kohler was angry at Lance and Olive for what he saw as their culpability in his lackluster sex life. He was, with this motivation, solely responsible for the fire, the framing of Lance for insurance fraud, and the bomb that killed Olive. To frame Lance, he needed help from an insurance insider, and he was friends with Andy Motyca from college, who in turn put Kinsey into the frame, but she was purely collateral damage from Terry’s point of view. He also bugged Lance’s office so he’d be aware of what Lance did or didn’t know.
Ebony, the oldest sister, simply wanted to be in the loop on what was going on with the fire/fraud situation. To this end, she brought in Daniel (by way of Bass) to plant a bug in Kinsey’s apartment. They were not responsible for any of the other stuff. Ash and Olive were not involved in any shenanigans at all. Ash was just an old friend of Kinsey’s who happened to be Kinsey’s “in” to the Wood family so she could clear her name. (Which made Kinsey a pretty bad choice for Andy to frame, as it turned out.) Olive’s past incestuous dalliance with Lance was obviously at the heart of the case, but she was completely clueless about Terry’s or Ebony’s machinations.
Beyond that, you are correct that Kinsey’s uncovering of Terry’s past crimes - and also his motive for and therefore his involvement in the current spate of crimes - is why Terry felt the need to eliminate Kinsey.