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Summary
Summary
Robbie Parsons is one of London's finest, a black cab driver who knows the city by heart. In his backseat is a man with a gun in his hand-a man who brazenly committed a crime in front of the Artemis Club then jumped in and ordered Parsons to drive. As the criminal eventually escapes to Nairobi, Detective Superintendent Richard Jury comes across the case in the Saturday paper. Two days previously, he had met and connected with one of the victims, a professor of astrophysics at Columbia and an expert gambler. Feeling personally affronted, Jury enlists Melrose Plant, Marshall Trueblood, and his whole gang of merry characters to contend with a case that involves Tanzanian gem mines, a closed Reno casino, and a pub that only London's black cabbies who have the knowledge can find. With their signature wit, sly plotting, and gloriously offbeat characters, Martha Grimes's New York Times bestselling Richard Jury Mysteries are utterly unlike anyone else's detective novels (The Washington Post).
Author Notes
Martha Grimes was born on May 2, 1931 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She received a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Maryland.
The idea for Martha Grimes' first British detective novel, The Man with a Load of Mischief (1981), was inspired by the name of a British pub she noticed while leafing through a travel book. A longtime Anglophile, she has continued to use a British pub as both the title and part of the setting in each subsequent novel in the series which features Scotland Yard Detective Richard Jury, his assistant, Melrose Plant, and Plant's interfering Aunt Agatha. The Anodyne Necklace (1983) won her the Nero Wolfe Award. Her other works include The Stargazey, The Case Has Been Altered, The End of the Pier, Biting the Moon, and Dust. Her title, Vertigo 42, made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2014.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
West's melodious British baritone smoothly sorts through the complicated plot and numerous characters in Grimes's 24th Richard Jury mystery. Det. Supt. Richard Jury is hunting for the man who shot and killed American physicist David Moffitt and his wife, Rebecca, in front of London's Artemis Club, a swanky art galley cum casino. The investigation leads Jury and his team to Africa following a tip from one of the kids in the Filth, a rough-and-tumble pack of kids, who spotted the murderer boarding a plane to Nairobi. West effortlessly transitions from one quirky character to the next. He gives delightful accents to British gentry such as Jury's sidekick, Melrose Plant, as well as to Plant's servants, Ruthven and Martha. He's even credible as the boys and girls of the Filth, particularly 10-year-old Patty, a competent schemer who tails the murderer as far as Nairobi and Tanzania. West is just as convincing when providing the voice of the hip owner of the art galley as he is in rendering the cool and confident cabbie who knows the streets of London backwards and forwards. West's mastery of Grimes's wit, twisting plot, and zany characters will keep listeners hooked from start to finish. An Atlantic Monthly hardcover. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Grimes' twenty-fourth mystery starring Richard Jury gets off to a breakneck start, with London cab driver Robbie Parsons picking up, first, a well-heeled American couple and dropping them off at an exclusive casino. Robbie then witnesses the couple dropping to the ground, dead from gunshot wounds. His next passenger is the gunman, who orders Robbie to drive through London. Besides the fast action, it's fascinating to see how Robbie uses a London cabdriver's deep familiarity with the streets (the Knowledge) to keep himself alive. Things span out from here. The gunman escapes into Waterloo Station. Detective Superintendent Jury takes on the case, which moves into Tanzania, Nairobi, Reno, and a London pub. (Longtime Grimes readers will remember that there is always a pub connection.) The flaw in the mystery is that it goes too far afield from Jury's usual stomping grounds, mixing in some of the jumpier elements of spy thrillers with police procedure and somewhat blurring the impact of the action. Still, Jury's devoted readership will find much to enjoy.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Whatever Robbie was expecting at the end of this tense trip, it wasn't a big tip and a compliment on his driving. But that's the way it is with Grimes: Great characters who say and do the most unexpected things are her stock in trade. The charmer here is 10-year-old Patty Haigh ("looks like a little girl, but acts like MI6"), one of a group of loosely parented children who hang around the stations at Waterloo and Heathrow, practicing the skills needed to be cops. Patty even talks her way into a firstclass seat on a plane to Nairobi by attaching herself to the murderer she's pursuing. "For someone who shoots people," she acknowledges, "he was pretty nice." Meanwhile, Grimes's irresistibly attractive Scotland Yard man is busy solving the murder of his newly acquired friends David Moffit, an American astronomer, and his wife, Rebecca. With enthusiastic assistance from his wealthy friend Melrose Plant and Plant's fellow drinkers at the Jack and Hammer pub, Jury manages to have multiple sets of eyes on his suspect. But our eyes are glued to Patty, off in Africa and having the time of her life. what's that smell? The acrid odor of fire is always cause for alarm in the mysteries C. J. Box sets in heavily forested Wyoming. But there's something strange about the odor that's coming from the burner at a lumber mill in the DISAPPEARED (Putnam, $27), "something that smelled a little like roast chicken." Wylie Frye, the night manager, recognizes the peculiar stench, but for $2,500 he can take shallow breaths and ignore it. The task of identifying that strange smell falls to Joe Pickett, the conscientious game warden in these rugged novels who is mostly charged with monitoring the wildlife of the region, where so much land is managed by the federal government. That explains his interest in a dicey wind energy project and his involvement with a group of falconers clamoring to hunt with eagles. But when a British tourist disappears from the dude ranch where Joe's daughter works, he shows the tough-and-tender qualities that make him such a great guy to have on your side. HISTORY comes alive when a character you think of as a friend is in the thick of the action. That's how Jacqueline Winspear keeps her Maisie Dobbs mysteries so fresh. TO DIE BUT ONCE (Harper, $27.99) opens in the spring of 1940, when the German Army is advancing on France and the British are preparing to evacuate. Maisie is already concerned about her office assistant, Billy Beale, who has a son at the front, when she receives an assignment from another worried father. Phil Coombes, landlord of the Prince of Wales pub, hasn't heard from 15-year-old Joe, an apprentice painter with Mike Yates and Sons, a firm that's been contracted to apply a fire-retardant emulsion to buildings at government airfields. Joe had been complaining of bad headaches, a detail that becomes much more significant when his body is discovered and, after the autopsy, Maisie learns he had suffered two brain injuries, one from a fall (or a push?) off a railroad bridge and one from exposure to toxins. Maisie's investigation takes on heft from its underlying theme of war profiteering, with greedy entrepreneurs like Mike Yates exposing their employees to life-threatening working conditions just to make a buck. Talking dirty can be great fun, especially when the trash talkers are Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, the cutup private eyes in Joe R. Lansdale's Texas crime capers. In jackrabbit smile (Mulholland / Little, Brown, $26), the partners are tasked with finding Jackie (Jackrabbit) Mulhaney, the daughter of white supremacists who don't care that Hap is irreverent and Leonard is black and gay. "We want her back," her mother says, "be it flesh, or be it bones." Jackie's father, Sebastian, a fire-breathing preacher, lived hard and died a sad and lonely death. But her brother, Thomas, is carrying the burning torch. For such a freewheeling stylist, Lansdale can write a sensitive obituary for a "confused and tortured soul" like Sebastian, as well as boisterous action scenes for his irrepressible leads. And he has compassion for places like Hell's Half Mile, "a line of honkytonks full of drunken patrons trying to wash down poverty, bad marriages and gone-to-hell children." ?
Kirkus Review
Detective Superintendent Richard Jury (Vertigo 42, 2014, etc.) joins with the usual friends and relations and a covey of London black cab drivers to unravel a spectacularly public double murder.Moments after cabbie Robbie Parsons drops American astrophysicist David Moffit and his beautiful British wife, Rebecca, in front of the Artemis Club, the exclusive casino/art gallery run by enterprising Leonard Zane, a man steps out of nowhere and shoots the two visitors dead. Even more remarkably, he gets into Robbie's cab, takes it to Waterloo Station, and catches a train to Heathrow without breaking a sweat. Unbeknownst to his passenger, Robbie has alerted his buddies in the black-cab network, and one of them, Patty Haigh, follows the shooter, steals a ticket for his flight to Dubai, chats him up, and ends up traveling in the next first-class pod. Patty, the latest in a long line of Grimes' tough, unflappable, endlessly resourceful preteen female heroes, reflects of her companion, who's booked passage under the name Bushiri Banerjee, that "for somebody who shoots people, he was pretty nice." Meanwhile, back in London, Jury is dispatching his old friend Melrose Plant to Nairobi, where Banerjee has flown from Dubai, and planted antiques dealer Marshall Trueblood as a dealer in the Artemis Club while Jury himself tries to figure out why Banerjee felt the need to shoot both Moffits and how their murders might be connected to the remarkably coincidental shooting of one Danny Morrissey in the Metropole, the Reno hotel Zane also owned, eight years ago. Many more coincidences will followsome actually coincidental, others not so muchseriously denting but never wrecking the mystery at the core of a whimsically digressive adventure in which Jury has to fight for attention, let alone resolution.Grimes' endlessly fertile imagination conjures up new people, places, and episodes that you'll want to hear all about however tangential they end up being to the dubious case that's supposed to tie them all together. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Grimes's latest "Richard Jury" mystery (after Vertigo 42) is a salute to those who drive the famous black cabs of London after passing the rigorous training course known as the Knowledge. The story begins with a glamorous couple, having emerged from the back of a black taxi, being gunned down in front of an exclusive London casino/art gallery. The shooter then gets in the cab and demands to be driven to several sites around London. He is followed by a clutch of -cabbies and a gaggle of children who keep tabs on him, including the redoubtable ten-year-old Patty Haigh, who cajoles her way aboard a flight to Africa in pursuit of the killer. Before it's all resolved, readers are introduced to the erratic streets of London, astrophysics, the blue gemstone tanzanite, and the comfort of first-class travel on Emirates Airlines. VERDICT Fans of Richard Jury should enjoy this new entry. Others will find a convoluted plot enlivened by fetching bit players, especially Patty, who comes equipped with a backpack overflowing with wigs, glitter, multiple pairs of glasses, and enough chutzpah to make even Baby Rose Marie look sedate. [Library marketing; five-city tour.]-Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.