The Blue Last |
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| "Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury returns in a compelling novel, the 17th in
Grimes's long-running series. Mickey Haggerty, Jury's old friend and colleague, is dying of
cancer. So Jury can hardly refuse his request to look into what Mickey suspects is a
50-year-old case of switched identities. It surfaces when the last World War II bomb site in
London is excavated for a new development, exposing the skeletal remains of a woman and
infant. Mickey thinks the dead infant wasn't the baby of Kitty Riordan, Maisie Tynedale's
nanny, as Kitty claimed, but was Maisie herself, the heiress to a brewery fortune. Did Kitty
engineer the masquerade? And did Simon Croft, who was writing a book about London in
the war years, discover it? When Croft is killed and his computer stolen, Jury sends his pal
Melrose Plant to snoop around Tynedale Lodge disguised as a gardener. There he
encounters a charming trio of amateurs: a homeless urchin and his extremely clever dog
Sparky, and Gemma, a Tynedale ward whose mysterious background may hold the clue to
Simon's murder as well as the still unsolved attempt on her young life. "As usual, Plant's world of eccentric friends and relatives is nicely evoked in a subplot that leads him on a surprising holiday in Florence, during which he acquires just enough knowledge of Italian Renaissance painting to pull off another disguise on Jury's behalf. Grimes weaves the threads of this rich tapestry together in a surprise ending that not even Grimes aficionados will sense coming. But it's an appropriate conclusion, given the book's brooding tone, established in the opening pages by a dying friend's obsession and sustained as the investigation forces Jury to confront his own haunted memories of the war. This is a solid page turner, marked by Grimes's unerring sense of pacing, respectful but provocative poking around in Jury's soul, and topnotch storytelling ability." -- from the Amazon.com website |
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