The Grave Maurice($11.18Value)

Description

In her follow-up to the best-selling novel The Blue Last, the author revisits sleuth Richard Jury, who is lying flat on his back recovering in a hospital bed but nevertheless is capable of overhearing a story that will start his next murder investigation. 125,000 first printing. In this, the 18th outing in Martha Grimes's popular series featuring Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury and his aristocrat pal Melrose Plant, Jury, recuperating from a near-fatal shooting ( The Blue Last ) hears about the two-year-old abduction of his doctor's talented young daughter, Nell Ryder, who disappeared from her grandfather's stud farm, along with a champion thoroughbred horse. Pursuing the stalled investigation when he's released from the hospital, Jury stumbles on a complicated scheme involving murder, insurance fraud, and a scheme to replicate a popular menopause drug derived from the urine of pregnant mares. As readers of this popular series know, while there's a mystery at the heart of every Jury novel, the real payoff is in Grimes's lucent prose, wit, and complex characterizations. Fans of British mystery writer Dick Francis , who's made the world of thoroughbreds his own turf, will find this a delightful diversion, particularly since Francis recently announced his retirement from the genre. --Jane Adams Richard Jury is back, and he's in the hospital but not for long. Dependable sidekick Melrose Plant has overheard the tale of a missing girl, and when it turns out that she is the daughter of Jury's surgeon and that the gossipy woman who related the story is now dead the daring duo take the case. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. This satisfyingly old-fashioned detective tale pays homage to Josephine Tey's famous historical mystery The Daughter of Time . Like Tey's detective, Richard Jury is bedridden, recovering from shotgun wounds. And, as in Tey, a colleague, the aristocrat Melrose Plant, tries to get Jury's mind off his wounds by having him puzzle over a crime. Tey's mystery of who murdered the princes in the tower is updated to who kidnapped and perhaps imprisoned a contemporary princess, the daughter of Jury's surgeon, who disappeared two years before from a stable that employed her. Although Grimes writes contemporary mysteries, readers may find themselves checking the dates given, since Grimes' style is veddy 1940s British cozy. The pace is leisurely (often to the point of exasperation, as Plant putters about in his sleuthing), and the language is decidedly throwback and formal. As in every Richard Jury of Scotland Yard novel (this is the eighteenth), the action centers on a pub--in this case, the Grave Maurice is the grim-looking pub in which colleague Plant overhears a conversation that gets him and Jury involved in the girl's disappearance. There is far too much of the foppish Plant (Jury is in the hospital for the first 26 chapters), but vintage Grimes nonetheless. Connie Fletcher Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Martha Grimes is the bestselling author of seventeen Richard Jury mysteries and also of the acclaimed fiction Cold Flat Junction , Hotel Paradise , The End of the Pier , and The Train Now Departing . 1. Twenty months later Melrose Plant looked around the rather grim environs of the Grave Maurice and wondered if it was patronized by the staff of the Royal London Hospital across the street. Apparently it did serve as some sort of stopping-off point for them, for Melrose recognized one of the doctors standing at the farther end of the long bar. As Melrose stood there inside the door, the doctor emptied his half-pint, gathered up his coat and turned to leave. He passed Melrose on his way out of the pub and gave him a distracted nod and a vague smile, as if he were trying to place him. Melrose stepped up to the place the doctor had left, filling the vacuum. He was looking at the woman close by, one of surpassing beauty-glossy, dark hair, high cheekbones, eyes whose color he couldn't see without staring but which were large and widely spaced. She was talking to another woman, hair a darkish blond, whose back was turned to Melrose and who drank a pale drink, probably a Chardonnay, whose ubiquity, together with the wine bars that loved to serve it up, Melrose couldn't understand. The dark-haired one was drinking stout. Good for her. The bartender, a bearded Indian, posed an indecipherable query that Melrose could only suppose was a variant of "What will it be, mate?" The operative term was either "grog" or "dog," as in "Want a bit o' grog?" or "Walkin' yer dog?" Having no dog, Melrose ordered an Old Peculier. The Grave Maurice had its foot in the door of "hovel-like." Melrose looked all around and made his assessment, pleased. For some reason, he could always appreciate a hovel; he felt quite at home. The incomprehensible barman, the patched window, the broken table leg, the streaked mirror, the clientele. The two women near him were a cut a