New Releases by Martha Grimes

The Richard Jury Mysteries continues with this “richly textured story” (The New York Times Book Review) following Richard as he investigates a complicated double murder mystery. The sun, smoking behind a haze of cloud, threw off a light of burnished pewter. Mysteriously lit, it was as if the watery, colorless land refused drabness, stood determinedly against dimishment. This is a landscape that can easily deceive, a landscape that volunteers nothing—much like the patrons of the only pub for miles around called The Case Has Altered. The Lincolnshire fenlands are the right setting for Richard Jury’s latest case, a mystifying double murder. The body of one woman is found on the wash; another woman lies floating in a canal in Windy Fen. Both women are connected with Fengate: Dorcas Reese, a servant; Verna Dunn, the louche ex-wife of the owner, Max Owen, a man with a passion for antiques. The case is only further complicated when the principal suspect turns out to be Jenny Kennington, a woman Jury has long loved. Will he be able to solve the case or is it hitting too close to home?

Saturday night. It was not a night to be spending alone, riding a bus. When he was a teenager at the comprehensive, Saturday night without a girl, without a date, without at least your mates to raise hell with, Saturday night alone would have been shameful. One wouldn’t want to be seen alone on a Saturday night…. Who are you kidding? That was never your life, Jury, not yours.

Following a passionate and troubled love affair with a pretty widow named Jane Holdsworth, Jury finds himself, unaccountably, a suspect in a murder investigation. Detained in London, Jury sends his friend Melrose Plant, former Earl of Caverness, to the Holdsworth family’s Lake District home to pose as an eccentric librarian. Plant discovers that his catalogue cards contain less data on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey than they do on tantalizing questions about the Holdsworths: What happened to Crabbe Holdsworth’s first wife? What happened to his son, Graham? What happened to the cook, Annie? And what might happen to the two children, favorites of rich old Adam Holdworth, who prefers the ambience of a swank retirement home, Castle Howe, where he and the elegant Lady Cray can drive the staff crazy? Jury and Sergeant Wiggins finally join Melrose at the Old Contemptibles pub, where they arrive at a solution that Jury detests, for no matter what he does, innocence will suffer.

From “one of the established masters of the genre” (Newsweek), another thrilling entry in the Richard Jury Mysteries that whisks us across the Atlantic to Baltimore. The murder is in America, but the call goes out to Scotland Yard superintendent Richard Jury. Accompanied by his aristocratic friend Melrose Plant and by Sargeant Wiggins, Jury arrives in Baltimore, Maryland, home of zealous Orioles fans, mouth-watering crabs, and Edgar Allen Poe. In his efforts to solve the case, Jury rubs elbows with a delicious and suspicious cast of characters, embarking on a trail that leads to a unique tavern called The Horse You Came In On.

In the tenth murderous case for Richard Jury, the New Scotland Yard superintendent witnesses a killing in a West Yorkshire inn called the Old Silent, while his highborn, amateur colleague, Melrose Plant wishes to he could perform one as he drives his impossible Aunt Agatha to the Old Swan in Harrogate. Caught up in a triple murder, Jury would go to any lengths to help Nell Healey, the lovely widow of one of the victims. But Nell Healey remains silent as the Yorkshire moors, quiet as the grave, while the scope of the mystery widens.

In a rainy ditch in a Devon wood, a hitchhiker is found dead. Almost a year later, on another rainy night, another murder; this time, however, the victim is found just outside a pub called I Am the Only Running Footman, near Berkeley Square in London’s fashionable Mayfair District. Devon policeman Brian Macalvie is convinced that the two murders are connected. And thus, in his eighth case, Richard Jury is drawn into the so-called Porphyria killings. A particularly elusive pair of murders. From the streets of London to the village of Somers Abbas, Jury and Macalvie are joined by the stolid if hypochondriac Sergeant Wiggins and the reluctant Melrose Plant. They meet in another pub, the Mortal Man, and, amidst the clatter and cry of the Warboys family, they ponder a labyrinthine set of clues.

In her latest Richard Jury adventure, Martha Grimes takes us to Ashdown Dean, a little English village where animals are dying in a series of seemingly innocuous accidents. While the puzzling deaths of village pets may raise some idle gossip over a pint or two at the Deer Leap, the village pub, this hardly seems a case for Superintendent Jury of Scotland yard. Nor does it seem much of a challenge for the combined deductive powers of Jury and Melrose, the affable former Earl of Caverness. It is his mystery-writing, amethyst-eyed friend, Polly Praed, who drags Plant and Jury to Ashdown Dean. The impatient Polly, having yanked open a call box in the pouring rain, is ill-prepared for what lands at her feet. The now-deadly case is cause for calling in Scotland Yard.

From the rough but colorful pub that provides the book’s title, to the snowboard Gothic estate nearby, the chilly English landscape has never held more atmosphere—or thwarted romance. And Jury will never have a more mysterious Christmas. Five Days Before Christmas: On his way to a brief holiday (he thinks) Jury meets a woman he could fall in love with. He meets her in a snow-covered graveyard—not, he thinks, the best way to begin an attachment. Four Days Before Christmas: Jury meets Father Rourke, who draws for him the semiotic square—“a structure that might simplify thought,” says the priest, but Jury’s thoughts need more than symbols. Three Days Before Christmas: Melrose Plant, Jury’s aristocratic and unofficial assistant, arrives at Spinney Abbey, now home to a well-known critic. Among the assembled snowbound guests he meets—Lady Assington, Beatrice Sleight, and the painter Edward Parmenger. When they all assemble in the dining room, Lady Assington announces, “I think we should have a murder.”

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.

A young friend pulls Scotland Yard’s Richard Jury into the life—and death—of a wealthy bachelor… The once-charismatic Billy Maples was last seen in a club named Dust, before his murder in a trendy London hotel. Proving as inscrutable—and challenging—to Jury as the case is the beautiful chief inspecting officer... Before his death, Maples was a patron of London’s finest art galleries and caretaker of author Henry James’s house in Rye. It’s there where Jury installs Melrose Plant, who takes his job to heart, as Jury closes in on the dark secrets behind Maples’s friends and family…

Twelve-year-old Emma investigates the suspicious drowning of another child. Her search for answers is both an inquiry into murder and a way to deliver herself from the confusion of childhood. It is the story of a mystery and also her story.

A waitress at her mother's decaying resort hotel, twelve-year-old Emma now has a second job as the youngest cub reporter in the history of La Porte's Conservative newspaper. But when she discovers the crumbling shell of a fabulous hotel- the once-sumptuous Belle Rouen-in the woods near her small town of Spirit Lake, Emma never imagines that the mysteries it holds will bring her one step closer to solving a forty-year-old crime-and force a new transgression to light.

The bestselling author of the Richard Jury novels delivers a razor-sharp and raucously funny send-up of the cutthroat world of publishing Paul is a struggling writer navigating the treacherous landscape of editors and literary agents. When he hires the infamous Mackenzie Haack as his publisher, he's plunged into a whirlwind of chaotic decisions and questionable choices. But as Paul dives deeper into the murky waters of the book publishing business, he becomes entangled in a murder plot that threatens to unravel everything.

Martha Grimes's Hotel Paradise was hailed by Booklist as "superb...beyond genre...one of the year's best." Now, Grimes returns to the same small town, intertwining the threads of one young girl's unexplained death with another young girl's attempt at making sense of her own life.

Richard Jury's friend overhears in a pub--The Grave Maurice--information about a girl who's been missing for more than a year. From its pastoral opening to its calamitous end, this 18th entry in the Richard Jury series is full of the same suspense and humor that devoted readers expect from Martha Grimes. Abridged.

In a unique departure from her acclaimed Richard Jury novels, bestselling author Martha Grimes presents "a lyrical coming-of-age journey" (Chicago Sun-Times) featuring two characters from her previous novels. A nameless young woman awakes in a strange bed-and-breakfast with a message that her "Daddy" will soon return. Fearing the worst, she flees into the wilderness and meets Mary Dark Hope. Together, the two track down the one person who holds the key to the girl's identity: The man who abducted her. "A HARROWING ROAD TRIP." --New York Times Book Review "MESMERIZING." --Los Angeles Times

Presents two novellas, including "Hotel Paradise," an exploration of the emotional isolation and identity quest of adolescence, and "The Train Now Departing," in which the female protagonist is embroiled in darkness by the man in her life.

"ONLY THE MAGNIFICENT MARTHA GRIMES COULD HAVE WRITTEN THIS BOOK. . . . BRILLIANTLY RENDERED AND SUPERBLY TEXTURED." --Andrew Vachss A neglected lake, covered with water lilies. A once fashionable, now faded resort. A derelict house full of secrets, uninhabited for almost half a century. The death of a twelve-year-old girl forty years in the past. And another girl who becomes obsessed with this death. With her knack for encouraging adults to reminisce, she begins to piece together puzzles from the past and present. HOTEL PARADISE is a delicate yet disturbing view of the decisions a young girl must make on her way to becoming an adult . . . and the choices she must make between right and wrong, love and truth, life and death. With its narrative grace, compelling characters, and intricate suspense, HOTEL PARADISE is Martha Grimes at the top of her form. "Utterly engaging." --The Washington Post Book World

In a sleepy resort town, Maud Chadwick waits tables at the Rainbow Cafe. Her confidant is Sheriff Sam DeGheyn and what they have in common is obsession. Maude doesn't want her son to leave home, and Sam cannot let go of the unsolved murders of three local women -- or his intuition that the killer is still out there. How these lives intertwine reveals a rich and startling story of parents and children and the pain they cause one another. "Gripping." CHICAGO SUN TIMES "From the Paperback edition.