Kinsey Millhone

Born May 5, 1950 in Santa Teresa, California, Kinsey was taken in by her Aunt Gin after her parents were killed in a car accident when Kinsey was five. Despite being ill-equipped for motherhood, Gin passed along to Kinsey a strong sense of self-sufficency, as well as a taste for peanut butter-and-pickle sandwiches.

After graduating from high school, Kinsey became a police officer at the local department, but her independence and dislike of the bureaucracy caused her to quit after two years. She then studied to become a private investigator and worked for a detective agency before going freelance in her late twenties.

Kinsey has been married twice, with both relationships ending in divorce. She has an informal long-distance relationship with Robert Dietz, a fellow P.I. and her one-time bodyguard and has been known to have an occasional fling.

Kinsey lives in a studio apartment adjacent to the home of her landlord Henry, a retired baker who encourages her to test the crossword puzzles he creates in his spare time. Both of them frequent the nearby tavern run by Rosie, a Hungarian woman married to Henry's brother. Kinsey wakes up at 6:00am most mornings to run a couple of miles, and she is entirely uninterested in fashion, owning one all-purpose little black dress and giving herself haircuts with a pair of fingernail scissors.