N is for Noose

by Sue Grafton

Hardcover, 1998

Status

Available

Publication

Henry Holt (1998), Edition: 1st, 289 pages

Description

PI Kinsey Millhone of California is hired by the widow of a policeman who refused to tell her what was on his mind. Kinsey learns he suspected some policemen of murder. When Kinsey opens an investigation, the town clams up.

Rating

½ (595 ratings; 3.6)

User reviews

LibraryThing member reading_fox
Closure. Kinsey is hired to investigate the last few weeks of a dead man's life, in order that the widopw can know what was troubling him so. Set in a closeknit mountain comunity town, Kinsey has difficulties perseuding anyone to say anything bad about the desceased. Her troubles grow when
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strangers start threatening her, but Kinsey never backs down, though the widow ends up wishing she'd never hired her.

Just about subplot free for a change!
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LibraryThing member readafew
This time Kinsey seemed even more set on getting herself killed. Personnally if I had as many different people try to kill me as she has, I would not be so trusting of all these people who've proven their willingness to kill. Up to this book I think this was the worst of them. Kinsey has blinders
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on to so many people she's more like a high school girl than a seasoned PI.

I rarely find myself wondering who-dun-it with these they are fairly easy and straight forward but I still enjoy reading most of them anyway.
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LibraryThing member LMayNev
Worse book I ever read. I had to read it for a book club, but have no history with the characters. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I had. I had the bad guy figured out as soon as he was introduced. Not fun.
LibraryThing member miyurose
Not a bad installment in the series. I somewhat had it figured out at the end, though.
LibraryThing member Susi
another Kinsey millhone mystery - great!
LibraryThing member dbhutch
Kinsey is back once again, taking a case on the recommendation of a friend, and not a good thing. This time around, her sometimes lover Deitz, refers her to and old client of his, since he is recovering from knee surgery. Kinsey finds herself drawn into a small remote town, that closes ranks when
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Kinsey comes to investigate the death of a beloved police officer. Not my favorite of Ms. Grafton's books so far, but definetly some very interesting twists in this one.
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LibraryThing member ffortsa
Kinsey accepts a commission to find out what was upsetting a small-town cop in the months before he died of a heart attack. His notes are missing, and there are unusual phone calls to the area code of St. Teresa that might relate to his preoccupation. Are the other local police implicated in
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something? The dead bodies that eventually turn up are old, and the dead were quite nasty, but are they part of the puzzle?

A reasonably satisfying story, although I was sometimes ahead of Kinsey, and I can't very well yell at her to pay attention, can I?
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LibraryThing member Heptonj
I had read this before but it was a long time ago so thought I'd give it another go. Pleased I did, this was the usual excellent read from Sue Grafton.

Kinsey bites off more than she can chew when she agrees, at the bequest of his wife, to look into the reasons a recently deceased law enforcement
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officer may have had something serious on his mind in the period before his death. On the surface, all seems to be in order with no obvious reason for the dead officer to have been troubled. However, not all is as it seems and Kinsey finds herself talking to a community who are tight-lipped where their own are concerned. Kinsey is attacked, ostricised and threatened before the book reaches it's final, surprising, conclusion.
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LibraryThing member kaulsu
Much better than the last in the series. Or at least I didn't get bored completely reading it, and didn't guess the culprit until Grafton wanted me to guess. No tricks, ala Christie, either. Whether it was quite believable...well I don't read murder mysteries for nonfiction!! Sorry, I don't believe
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in "spoiler alerts" so I won't discuss the plot. Except that in "M" Millhone said she no longer carried a gun, and in "N".... Well, I guess "carrying" and "owning" are two different things....
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LibraryThing member thebookbabe
I listened to the audio/CD (unabridged) version of the book in the car while commuting. The reader was fine but the story was pretty lame. I hadn't read a Grafton in some years - left off around K or L - but I don't remember the stories being this boring. The plot was lame, characters completely
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unmemorable. But I've been trying to get into audio books for a while, I'll definitely try another Grafton eventually, but I'd like to try a variety of readers and genres.
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LibraryThing member wdwilson3
I've read every one of Grafton's books (in sequence, even) and I have to agree with the consensus that this isn't one of her best. Why? The small town setting, where everyone's either a cop or a waitress seemed phoney. And I didn't see the point in her running home to Santa Teresa -- it seemed like
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a device to drag in her local cast of characters in for a couple of chapters, and they were pretty wooden old props in this volume, weren't they? I hope that this book is an aberration and that the next one will get back on the right track, but Grafton might be excused if it's becoming harder to breathe life into her characters -- it's happened to many a mystery writer.
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LibraryThing member dchamp
Boring! Slow! Makes we wonder if I want to spend time on "O". Nothing happens until the last 10 pages of the book. Very disappointed.
LibraryThing member Mrsbaty
When N is for Noose begins, Kinsey is just leaving Dietz at his home, having helped him recover from his knee surgery. She is driving up to a small town in the mountains to talk to a potential client referred to her by Dietz. The client’s husband died recently and while it appears to be a natural
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death of a heart attack, she wants to know what was bothering him the last six weeks of his life.

The description of behavior in a small town when an outsider starts asking questions may be a bit more extreme than what I think it realistic but not too far off the mark. The atmosphere gets very creepy very quickly as Kinsey digs deeper into the case. People want her to stop and they make that clear.

The ending is satisfying and I actually didn’t see it coming as quickly as I did with some of the earlier Kinsey mysteries. This one is much more of a page-turner than the last few have been!
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LibraryThing member bookworm12
Kinsey is hired by a vain and difficult widow. Her cop husband died of a heart attack and she is convinced that he was investigating something big before his death. He had a reputation of refusing to let things go; pursuing cases long after they'd been solved if he smelled something fishy.

After
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investigating in the tiny town for awhile Kinsey realizes that people are are avoiding or shunning her. She can't even get gas for her car because someone has been spreading rumors about her past. The plot moves slowly and isn't too thrilling. The end is good and wraps things up nicely, but the book feels thin, much of it acting as filler.

BOTTOM LINE: Not one of Grafton's best mysteries. Each one seems to be very hit or miss, but my expectations are always low.
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LibraryThing member lkernagh
Another good installment in the Kinsey Millhone/Alphabet series and a perfect change of pace for me after having spent the past 4 weeks listening to War and Peace. This one pretty much picks up just two months after where [M is for Malice] left off. While my prime enjoyment for these stories comes
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from being able to 'travel back in time' to the 1980/90's with a spunky female private investigator to visit, this one had a good level of suspense built in. While this was one of those rare times where I was able to figure out the culprit before the reveal, Grafton was still able to keep my interest as Kinsey worked her way through the details to the conclusion.

Overall, a good solid mystery and a great reading palette cleanser for me.
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LibraryThing member polywogg
BOTTOM-LINE:
Solid entry, different location than most of the stories
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PLOT OR PREMISE:
Kinsey Milhone takes a case in a small town. Dead is a cop, apparently of a heart attack. But his wife, unloved by the community and perhaps deservedly so, knows that something had been bothering her husband before
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he died, and now she wants to know what, for her own piece of mind. So she hires Kinsey to find out what was going on, but not everyone shares the wife's desire to know. Kinsey finds out relatively quickly that the cop had been investigating a year-old murder case, that originally looked like a suicide by hanging (hence the title). However, the method of suicide exactly matched another case, so he knew it wasn't suicide -- hence an investigation that had been going nowhere. Worse still, the only suspects were in the small town, and most of them were friends. Kinsey searches, finds the original path of inquiry and starts digging. In the process she gets beat up, warned off, almost fired, belittled by her client, and pretty much treated badly by everyone in the town when they find out she isn't the innocent little camper people mistook her for at the beginning.
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WHAT I LIKED:
The story is pretty linear, although Grafton takes her own sweet time bringing Kinsey to see it. There's a short intro to some problems with Rosey back home, obviously something to come up again in a later book, but most of it is just Kinsey alone in the small town getting nowhere. Once she cottons on to the real path, the investigation is pretty straight-forward, but she doesn't see the result until it is almost too late. There's some really weird stuff at the end to do with some drugged-out hallucinations, and it makes for an interesting incapacitation plotline.
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WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:
Grafton takes a little too long to get to the investigation, almost like the story started out as a short story, with all the stuff at the start added to expand the length. Although the tightness of the ending makes the story move along, it all wrapped up too quickly.
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DISCLOSURE:
I received no compensation, not even a free copy, in exchange for this review. I am not personal friends with the author, nor do I follow her on social media.
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LibraryThing member jguidry
This was probably my favorite in the Kinsey Millhone series so far. The storyline and action kept it moving. The beginning was slow, but it picked up quickly. The characters were interesting and the situations were different. I was intrigued by the mystery and was surprised by the ending. The
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motive was predictable, but it was still a good read.
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LibraryThing member lamotamant
Meh, another disappointing book in the series. I keep expecting Millhone to actually live up to the "badass" she's forever claiming to be. Sometimes she passes muster but most of the time the character comes off as a flub. After all the scrapes she's been in she's decided not to carry a weapon?..
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and the like. Not to mention the bizarrely lazy ending to this plot. I get that the abusive prick of the story was pretty much revealed in his perverse predilections when Millhone talked to the two daughters leading to her realization in the moment of who had actually been victimized/who the killer was but the psychology of the victim/killer was hardly acknowledged. Millhone often just seems like such a flat character to me. There's a bit of a shining moment here and there but for the most part I find her lacking any great spark.
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LibraryThing member Carolee888
This is my first time to listen or read anything by Sue Grafton. The reader of the audio tapes was Judy Kaye, she did a wonderful job changing her voice expertly for the different ages and sexes in this story.

I enjoyed the first part of the story not so much for the mystery but for the character
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of Kinsey Milhoun. Twice divorced, she seemed to have a sort of burnt out feeling about life and men, and work. Her job was to find out why Sheriff Tom Newquist was acting so upset and unlike himself just before he had a heart attack in his car that killed him. The author built up the character of Tom very well and and he seems a great guy who even though he was messy at home was very organized when working his cases.

The pace of the story was slow at the beginning but I didn't mind it because it was spent on creating the characters who were very interesting. Later on, a piece of information to the puzzle came and Kinsey experiences a threat to her life. Then the pace broke into a rapid speed and it was difficult to stop listening.

I would enjoy reading more by this author. I like the simple and direct talk through out the story and the interesting ending.
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LibraryThing member dasam
It was an exciting read and I would have rated it higher except for some plot devices that seem hard to believe: Here is a woman who has been a detective for a while now, who has been shot and has shot suspects. Yet she always seems to forget her gun so she can get paced in more danger and make the
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story more "exciting." There are other examples of stupid actions that seem to belie her experience and intelligence. It's like the character of the first novel has lost ground.
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LibraryThing member hopeevey
Excellent sense of place, interesting characterizations, poorly done mystery.
LibraryThing member lamour
On her way home from helping her sometimes lover Dietz recover form his knee surgery, Kinsey stops in Nota Lake to take on an assignment that Dietz is not well enough to do. On meeting the client, Selma Newquist, the assignment seems vague in that Selma wishes Kinsey to find out what was stressing
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her husband when he died of a heart attack.

Tom Newquist was highly thought of and soon Kinsey detects most members of the local sheriffs office are not too happy with her investigating what Tom as up to during the weeks before his death. Then she learns that Tom's stress seem to start when the bodies of two men are discovered in isolated areas and both seem to have committed suicide using the same bizarre method of throwing a rock attached to the hanging rope off a cliff. Kinsy learns that the two men knew one another and had connections to Nota Lake.

This is a fast paced mystery with many twists and turns that puts Kinsey in major danger.
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LibraryThing member DocWalt10
As always, a great read. Never a dull moment. Her books could be read in one seating if one had the time. I never tire of Kinsey Millhone, the main character in Sue Grafton's books. She is an independent young woman, self-employed, doing what she loves to do and is good at it. As a private
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investigator, she is a minority in her field. If you enjoy suspense, this is book and series for you
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LibraryThing member TVNerd95
OMG this book has even less redeemable characters than M is for Malice. Even though I wasn’t thrilled with any of the characters it did have two things going for it that I enjoyed better than M is for Malice. One is a really intriguing case and a cold case – I was immediately interested in the
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stories and how Kinsey was going to connect them. Two is when Kinsey is not in Santa Teresa. I love watching her deal with strangers and strange locations because it allows the author to really showcase Kinsey’s skills as an investigator. Not only is Kinsey in a strange location but in a very hostile work environment where no one likes her or her client. Overall a better book to me than the last one.
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LibraryThing member laytonwoman3rd
Kinsey is hired by a widow to find out what was stressing out her late husband in the months before he died of a heart attack. Having just finished nursing her sometime lover and bodyguard, Dietz, through a knee operation, Kinsey is grappling with her own sense of independence, so when things turn
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ugly and she becomes a target of someone who clearly does not want this investigation to continue, she must face some tough decisions....quit and go home? Or push on in spite of her growing fears? Life is never dull or predictable in Kinsey's world.
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Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

1998-05-15

Physical description

9 inches

ISBN

0805036504 / 9780805036503
Page: 1.167 seconds