Review: The Stargazey
from Publishers Weekly, August 10, 1998
Grimes's latest caper starring English Superintendent Richard Jury
and his aristocratic friend, Melrose Plant, has a plot that is at best
wild and at worst totally indecipherable. But, as usual with Grimes
(The Case Has Altered, 1997), it doesn't matter because her cast is
so wonderfully daffy and endearing. This time, the mayhem is set in
motion when Jury, atypically, follows a glamorous woman in a
splendid sable coat who intrigues him by getting on and off a London
bus in Fulham. He loses her when she enters the grounds of Fulham
Palace, an old bishop's mansion. The next day, she-or someone very
like her-is found murdered in the palace's herb garden. In addition to
Melrose and his attendant eccentrics, the cast includes an aging
movie star, her spry young granddaughter, a retired art critic, a
painter whose all-white series is known as "Siberian Snow," a pair of
art dealers, an East End painter whose skill is more impressive than
her grammar, and a club, known as Borings, which has to be the
most picture-pe rfect rendition of a stuffy London club ever penned.
Its geriatric waiter, known as Young Higgins, only comes to life when
a member is stabbed in a club armchair. That plot, by the way,
involves the machinations of a highly improbable international female
assassin, and Grimes thinks so little of her she lets her get clean
away.
-- Editor: Ray Roberts; agent, Peter Lampack
Publishers Weekly
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