Here we are all the way up to V, and Sue Grafton is still springing narrative surprises. Grafton is of course the author of the series featuring the California private eye Kinsey Millhone. The titles for the books run through the alphabet, beginning almost 30 years ago with A is for Alibi. Now, in V is for Vengeance, Grafton performs the unthinkable by presenting readers with a portrait of the book’s major villain that is much more sympathetic than condemning.

The story begins with Millhone in the lingerie section of the local Nordstrom’s. That’s unlikely territory for casual Kinsey who usually confines her clothes shopping to low-end chain stores. In Nordstrom’s, she spots a 50ish woman who is carrying out slick pieces of shoplifting among the store’s silk lounge wear. In swift order, Kinsey alerts store security who pack the woman off to jail from which she’s soon released on bail. Next day, the shoplifter’s body is found at the bottom of a very high bridge, apparently a suicide.

Suffering from a guilty conscience over her role in the woman’s death, Kinsey decides to dig into the story behind the so-called suicide. Sure enough, she finds plenty of fishy people and puzzling events. All of this is usual in the Millhone books. Indeed, familiarity in concept and characters makes one of the series’ great comforts.

So we relax into the byplay involving Kinsey’s octogenarian landlord Henry and Henry’s equally aged but spry siblings. These people, as supporting characters, are unfailingly entertaining. In the new book, brother William’s disquisition on the value of attending the visitation and funeral of a complete stranger is alone worth the price of admission.

Meanwhile, as the cozy story of Kinsey’s life and investigation unfolds, all of it told in her first-person voice, Grafton drops in third-person chapters that trace the tale of a sinister but attractive man named Lorenzo Dante. This fellow happens to be the secretive capo of the mob as it exists in Kinsey’s hometown of Santa Teresa and environs.

Dante is rich, but has problems. His father, the retired capo, is blind to forces that threaten the mob’s existence. Dante’s younger brother is a psycho killer. Dante himself has been long planning an escape from this turmoil into an extravagantly funded retirement far from big time crime.

Though Kinsey’s crime solving has its fascinations, the reader becomes more deeply involved in Dante’s dilemmas. Will he evade his own mob’s clutches? And what about a woman who enters the plot, the wife of a wealthy lawyer? Is she part of Dante’s escape package? Gradually, these pressing questions upstage Kinsey’s adventures. Who, at this advanced stage in the Millhone saga, would have imagined such a delicious turn of events?

Kinsey plays a smaller role in this story, which may not please some of her many fans, but Grafton's pioneering sleuth is as clever and witty as ever.