SUE Grafton reaches the letter Q in her acclaimed alphabet series, featuring private investigator Kinsey Millhorne.

Q Is For Quarry (MacMillan, £12.99) sees Kinsey team up with two old detectives who are trying to clear up the case of a young woman whose body was found dumped near a quarry 18 years ago. The woman's hands were bound with wire, she had multiple stab wounds and her throat had been cut. Despite a lengthy investigation the killer, or the woman's ID, were ever found.

As Kinsey tries to piece together the woman's last movements, she finds herself in dangerous waters.

The novel is based on a real-life unsolved murder from 1969. Grafton's interest in the case has generated renewed police efforts and in the past year the body has been exhumed.

Soul Circus by George P. Pelecanos (Orion, £12.99) is the third to feature private investigator Derek Strange and his partner, Terry Quinn.

Strange is trying to save former drugs baron Granville Oliver from the death penalty, but someone is desperate to stop him from finding evidence that could free him. If that were not bad enough, Strange and Quinn find a young woman in what appears to be a routine disappearance case; but she is later murdered in a local park.

A grim, but compelling, look at life in Washington.

Phillip Margolin is another one of those lawyers-turned-authors who seem to be flooding the market.

In Ties That Bind (Time Warner, £17.99), lawyer Amanda Jaffe is mixed up with a group of powerful political and business leaders, hell bent on keeping their college antics secret as well as their present links with South American drug barons.

There's a huge list of characters, most of whom end up dead.

A slick plot, with many twists and turns and an explosive ending of which James Patterson would be proud.

Updated: 08:50 Wednesday, April 09, 2003