Looking over the Amazon listing of her alphabet mysteries, Quarry seems to be one of the lower rated, by the fans. It's still at 3.5/5 stars, but there are a lot of complaints about it being too slow, and not up to the level of her best work. I'd agree, but since I've never read anything else by her, I don't have an opinion.  I certainly hope her other stuff is better, since this one was pretty mediocre, and it makes me unhappy when I see crappy writers churning out best seller after best seller.

Here's my categorized score, with some more discussion below:

Q is for Quarry, by Sue Grafton
Plot: 4
Concept: 5
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/8
Characters: 5
Fun Factor: 3
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 3
Overall: 4.5

Yes, I've added a few more categories. These are all explained on the Reviews Main Page as well.

Overall, Quarry isn't a bad book, it's just not very good. It's occasionally boring, there's very little action or suspense, none of the characters are remarkable of memorable, and the plot isn't especially compelling. I got through it largely since it flowed well (writing flow), and by that I mean the words were laid out in smooth fashion, scenes connected logically, there wasn't too much bog down time in any area, and she didn't skip over too many things that I missed reading, etc. There were boring stretches, but those were the fault of the plot.

Plus I wanted to see how it turned out.

The mystery wasn't bad. Its biggest failing was that I didn't care who done it, either before or after I found out. The plot proceeded apace, the pool of suspects was narrowed, then enlarged, then finally narrowed to two, with an epilogue explaining which of them was the actual culprit and what happened after the semi-action climax.  It wasn't a poorly-done mystery, it just had a lot of relatively boring characters, lots of "Let's drive here and talk to Person A, then drive back over there and talk to Person B, and then go back to our hotel to type up our notes and think the case over and decide we need to go talk to Person A again tomorrow." It was a vivid portrait of just how boring and foot-weary private investigation really is, but it's always tricky to write about a bored character, without boring the reader in the process. It's even trickier when the stuff a reader finds boring is the meat of the novel, and is probably not intended by the author to be boring.

The protagonist, Kinsey Millhone, isn't very memorable, at least not from this novel. The novels are all set in the 1980s (theoretically to avoid having to deal with modern complications like cell phones, the Internet, etc), this one in 1988 or so. Kinsey is based in a fictional town in Central California, just north of LA, and she's a female private investigator, in her late 30s, who was orphaned when she was five. She's in decent physical condition, twice divorced, not dating or looking for love, and is estranged from her family. (There's a slight subplot in Quarry about Kinsey meeting her aunt and possibly growing closer to the imperious grandmother who banished her rebellious mother from the family.)

Kinsey isn't a bad character, but she's rather unremarkable. She's not brilliant like Holmes or Poirot, she's not quirky, she's not an addict or drunk or junkie, she's not a slut, she's not manic about anything, etc. I kept expecting to run into more weird personality quirks, since most detectives in mystery novels have those, but she seems to be very much an "every-woman." That's probably a large part of the appeal of these novels, since most readers can imagine themselves as her, or at least imagine they know someone like her. I personally would have liked some more quirks to make her character more interesting and sympathetic, but I suppose mysteries are full of those and Grafton wanted to make her detective more of an average person.

Kinsey isn't brilliant, and the novel lets us know everything as she learns it. There's none of that, "Holmes looked around the room and exclaimed, 'I have it! To the station at once!'" type stuff, where you see the brilliant detective solve the case and then have to wait for the revelation to see if you guessed correctly. (You seldom do.) Kinsey works on the case with a lot of foot work, lots of interviews, lots of phone calls, etc. It's tedious, unrewarding toil, for the most part, but gradually, as she learns more, things start to take shape. I applaud the book for its (apparent?) realism, but I also found myself getting bored when Kinsey drove across town for the fifteenth time to talk to so and so again in hopes or jarring loose a bit more information. Some more summation of the, "my day was uneventful and full of dead ends" style would have made for a quicker read, but since the book was only 390 pages of big type and wide margins, that might have made it feel too hurried, and the novel too short.

However, while I didn't find Kinsey very interesting or memorable, I am coming in 17 books along, when most of her personality traits and behaviors are long since developed. Long time fans of the series, who undoubtedly make up the bulk of the readers of this novel, would have been bored with the longer, more detailed introduction to her character that I wanted to read.

The thing about Quarry that I found most noteworthy was something about Grafton's writing style. It's not something that really registers in the above ratings, comprehensive as they attempt to be. To be honest, Grafton doesn't have much of a writing style, which I don't mean as an insult, since far more published authors have awful style than no style, or rarer yet, good style. Grafton's writing is serviceable, but nondescript. There were a few funny scenes, and a few nice analogies (my favorite was a simile that compared a line of parked campers to piano keys) but by and large the book could have been written by anyone. Nothing about it sucked, but there wasn't much memorable either. I didn't get much difference in the character's voices either; everyone pretty much talked the same, without many/any idiosyncrasies. All of this is true of 95% of the books I read, so I'm not really picking on Grafton here, but the dialogue, like most everything else about the book, was just okay.

Her most noticeable stylistic technique is the extensive physical description she gives to every character. Every time a new character first appears (Which happens at least 20 times since most of the book is about the Private Investigator main character traveling around and meeting/interviewing new people.) there is a big paragraph detailing exactly what they look like, what they're wearing, the environment they're encountered in, etc. This isn't really a bad thing, but I soon found myself skimming over those paragraphs. Most of the characters she (the PI main character) meets are seen once or twice and never more, so why should I, as a reader, bother trying to remember whether or not they have a receding hairline or wear glasses, when I'm not going to read about them again for 130 pages, if at all? More importantly, how they look never matters. No one does anything based on whether they're far or thin, ugly or handsome, etc. It's purely trivial detail, at least for me.

However, I don't often spend much time describing what characters look like in my fiction, and I hardly ever remember faces in real life, so obviously I have some degree of bias or disinterest in facial features of human beings. I don't really visualize character's faces; in my own work or the work of others. When people talk about who they think would be perfect to play a character in a movie, or that they dislike an actor so chosen, I usually shrug, since I've just never given much thought to what the character looks like. Obviously I want a serious actor for a serious character, a comedian for a joking guy, appropriate age, gender, size, etc, but as long as it's not ridiculously inappropriate casting, I really don't care and I figure the writers and the actor can work something out. 

That being admitted, I do describe physical traits in my writing... when it matters. And only as far as it matters. (At least that's what I'm shooting for.) For a quick example, in the first chapter of my ongoing fantasy novel, Vena and the as-of-yet-unnamed Necromancer encounter and battle two Paladins in the cemetery. I describe the Paladins as wearing similar armor, and add that one is older with a white ponytail, and the other is younger and has a black beard. That's it, and that allows me to differentiate between them very quickly. I can just say "the old one" or the "white-haired one" or the "bearded one" and that's that. The reader doesn't need to know what they look like in any more detail than that, and in fact the reader would be distracted by it. Sure, I could have gone on and on about how one had a mole and a large, crooked nose that had obviously been broken several times, and how the other had thin lips and a missing front tooth and a scar on his chin... but for that scene, it wasn't necessary. Hell, I could have gone into the omniscient Stephen King info dump style and listed their names and ranks, talked about formative experiences in their childhood, described their lunch choices, flashed back to how they spent their days before the encounter in the cemetery, etc. I didn't because it wasn't relevant to the scene, I knew that it would have slowed down the action-paced flow of things, (Much as that extended example bogged down the pacing of this paragraph.) and since the chapter is written entirely from the POV of Vena, who doesn't know any more about the Paladins than what her scared eyes show her in the darkness of the cemetery.

[Just to keep things up to date on the reworked, not-available-online, no-longer-Diablo-related version of that novel that I'm now working on, they are no longer called "Paladins," they and the Necromancer have very different magical abilities, etc. However, this example still applies since the amount of space I spend describing them (long hair vs. bearded) is still pretty much as it is in the early version of the chapter linked to above.]

My point is that different writers spend different amounts of time describing character's physical details, and that I don't spend much time on it, and don't think it's really that important. I'm much more concerned with what they're doing, how they fit into the plot, how the main characters are going to react to them, etc. And yeah, a writer can do all of that, plus describe them in detail.  Some readers probably love all of the physical description stuff, even when it's not "needed," in my opinion, and will miss it in my work. I didn't really mind the amount of it in Grafton's novel, even though I skimmed most of it since I didn't care and after the first 6 or 8 characters were detailed in such photographic style, I began to realize it was just her style and that it would never be referred to again. (I.E., she never described someone in such detail, and then later on mentioned a character seen only in shadow, with just one or two features described; the sort of plot element that would make you wish you'd memorized what the characters looked like; the description info was entirely irrelevant to the book, other than adding depth or weight or length.)

Here's an example, taken mostly at random, (I opened the book, started flipping through, and when the first 2 introductory descriptions I ran into were way too long to bother transcribing, I kept going until I hit this one.) from the start of chapter 9, page 113 of the hardcover version of Q is for Quarry: 

As I said, there's nothing bad about it or the writing; it's just that after hitting one of these every dozen pages for an entire novel, when there's never any reason to remember them afterwards, it gets old.