“U Is for Undertow” by Sue Grafton (A Marian Wood Book/Putnam, 403 pgs., $27.95)

NEW ORLEANS — Can it really be 27 years since Kinsey Millhone sifted through clues in “A Is for Alibi”?

And can Sue Grafton really be approaching the end of the alphabet?

The answers are yes, and yes, and as the end of the series looms, Grafton has never been better.

Millhone, who is still solving crimes in the 1980s and just about to turn 38, has changed little since that first novel. She’s still living alone and slightly in love with her landlord, Henry.

By this time, though, the plot is more complicated than usual, and much darker.

Millhone is working in her office when a man shows up unannounced and tells her a recent newspaper article about a 20-year-old kidnapping has unleashed a flood of memories for him. It was his sixth birthday, Michael Sutton tells Millhone, when a 4-year-old-girl was kidnapped. In his recently restored memories, Sutton remembers being in the woods behind his house that day and he thinks he knows where child was buried. Millhone is skeptical, but reluctantly agrees to devote a day to the case.

As all fans know, Millhone is a loner, raised by a cantankerous aunt after her parents were killed in a car crash. Her feelings for family have been bitter and distant. Her mother was disowned for marrying her father and Millhone didn’t know any of her relatives until a few books back.

That is another situation Millhone also needs to clear up, and in “U is for Undertow,” she finally does.