Martha Grimes Books

These two linked novellas, The Train now Departing and When 'The Mousetrap' Closes, both explore emotional isolation and identity within human relationships.

There is ?suspense on every page?(Cleveland Plain Dealer) in this follow-up to Biting the Moon? now available in paperback. In Martha Grimes?s acclaimed novel Biting the Moon, amnesiac drifter Andi Oliver sought the one man who held the key to her past. Now, Andi continues from one small town to the next, surviving the dangerous expanse of the Western plains, until she finds her mission?and menace?in Dakota. Taking a job at Klavan?s pig farming facility, Andi learns the gruesome truth of modern livestock management. As she begins to uncover the even darker secrets about Klavan?s sister facility, Big Sun, a stranger from her past comes to the surface? demanding information of which Andi has no memory.

Long Piddleton's local inn is the venue for a particularly grisly murder, and one which took place while many of the village's most distinguished residents were on the premises. Scotland Yard's irrepressibly unconventional Inspector Richard Jury is enlisted to help with the murder enquiry.

Chief Inspector Michael Haggerty asks Richard Jury to prove brewing magnate Oliver Tynedale's granddaughter is an impostor. Excavation of Tynedale's bombed London pub, the Blue Last, has turned up two skeletons - was the child found his real granddaughter? Meanwhile Melrose Plant reluctantly poses as an under gardener to investigate the nanny who purportedly saved the baby's life.

The latest installment in the Richard Jury series features a gripping double-homicide investigation that intertwines London's elite with the criminal underbelly known as "the Filth." As detectives delve into the case, they uncover connections to Kenyan art, rare gems, and astrophysics, all while navigating a web of long-standing revenge. MWA Grand Master Martha Grimes weaves a complex narrative that promises intrigue and suspense.

"The author keeps us enthralled with the rich interior and exterior lives of her characters in this emotionally stormy family saga." THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW When Scotland Yard superintendent Richard Jury is drawn into a brief affair with a troubled widow named Jane Holdsworth, her subsequent death makes him a suspect in her murder. Unable to leave London, Jury sends Melrose Plant, eighth Earl of Caverness to the Lake District to pry open the Holdsworth family's locked box of secrets. Plant does what he is bidden, in his own particular style, and what he uncovers is a shocking sheaf of surprises about the death-prone Holdsworth clan and its growing number of orphans.... "As always, Grimes' characters are gems, and her writting is as witty as ever." USA TODAY Selected by the Literary Guild and the Mystery Guild

The popular mystery writer and her son present a dual account of their struggles with alcoholism and sobriety, a parallel journey marked by poignant episodes of relapse, travel, and friendship.

Superintendent Jury, Melrose Plant, Wiggins, and Police Chief Macalvie gather in Devon at an out-of-the-way pub to connect a twenty-year-old murder with a series of recent killings.

New Scotland Yard superintendent Richard Jury is convinced it's more than coincidence when two beautiful young women are found strangled to death with their own scarves -- one in Devon, the second outside a fashionable Mayfair pub. Both women were as strikingly similar in life as they were in death. Neither had enemies that Jury can find. Now, somewhere in the night, a killer is biding his time, beckoning Jury and Devon's local divisional commander, Brian Macalvie, down an elusive trail of tragic family secrets and even more fatal lies....

"Chew on this," says Melrose Plant to Richard Jury, who's in the hospital being driven crazy by Hannibal, a nurse who likes to speculate on his chances for survival. Jury could use a good story, preferably one not ending with his own demise. Plant tells Jury of something he overheard in The Grave Maurice, a pub near the hospital. A woman told an intriguing story about a girl named Nell Ryder, granddaughter to the owner of the Ryder Stud Farm in Cambridgeshire, who went missing more than a year before and has never been found. What is especially interesting to Plant is that Nell is also the daughter of Jury's surgeon. But Nell's disappearance isn't the only mystery at the Ryder farm. A woman has been found dead on the track-a woman who was a stranger even to the Ryders. But not to Plant. She's the woman he saw in The Grave Maurice. Together with Jury, Nell's family, and the Cambridgeshire police, Plant embarks on a search to find Nell and bring her home. But is there more to their mission than just restoring a fifteen-year-old girl to her family? The Grave Maurice is the eighteenth entry in the Richard Jury series and, from its pastoral opening to its calamitous end, is full of the same suspense and humor that devoted readers expect from Martha Grimes.