Most Popular Books by Martha Grimes

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 The Blue Last, Richard Jury finally faces the last thing in the world he wants to deal with—the war that killed his mother, his father, his childhood. Mickey Haggerty, a DCI with the London City police, has asked for Jury''s help. Two skeletons have been unearthed in the City during the excavation of London''s last bombsite, where once a pub stood called the The Blue Last. Mickey believes that a child who survived the bombing has been posing for over fifty years as a child who didn''t. The grandchild of brewery magnet Oliver Tyndale supposedly survived that December 1940 bombing . . . but did she? Mickey also has a murder to solve. Simon Croft, prosperous City financial broker, and son of the one-time owner of The Blue Last is found shot to death in his Thames-side house. But the book he was writing about London during the German blitzkrieg has disappeared. Jury wants to get eyes and ears into Tynedale Lodge, and looks to his friend, Melrose Plant, to play the role. Reluctantly, Plant plays it, accompanied on his rounds of the Lodge gardens by nine-year-old Gemma Trim, orphan and ward of Oliver Tynedale; and Benny Keagan, a resourceful twelve-year-old orphaned delivery boy. And Richard Jury may not make it out alive. A stolen book, stolen lives, or is any of this what it seems? Identity, memory, provenance - these are all called into question in The Blue Last

The death of a girl found on a London street as well as the discovery of the body of a woman prompts Richard Jury to join forces with Plant and Macalvie, commander of the Devon and Cornwall police, to investigate a murder.

"Intricate and entertaining . . . A delicious puzzle." The Boston Globe 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 Sergeant Wiggins, Jury arrives in Baltimore, Maryland, home of zealous Orioles fans, mouth-watering crabs, and Edgar Allan 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" . . .

The Dirty Duck is a pub in Shakespeare’s beloved Stratford, and in this pub Miss Gwendolyn Bracegirdle of Sarasota, Florida, fresh from a performance of As You Like It, takes her last drink. A few minutes later she is slashed ear to ear, the only clue: two lines from an unknown poem printed across a theater program. The razor-happy murderer, it seems is stalking a group of rich American tourists. And Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury, just passing through Stratford for a glimpse of the intriguing Lady Kennington, instead takes a crash course in the bloodier side of Elizabethan verse.

When a dismembered corpse is found in the compartments of an antique writing bureau, Marshall Trueblood, recipient of the precious piece of furniture, is the first to protest: “I bought the desk, not the body, send it back.” Who would want to kill Simon Lean, the greedy nephew of the wealthy Lady Summerston? Leave it to Superintendent Richard Jury of Scotland Yard to suggest a connection to the murder of brassy Limehouse lady named Sadie Driver, found dead near Wapping Old Stairs…if that stone-cold body on the slipway is really Sadie. Not even her brother, Tommy, on a visit from Gravesend, can swear to it.

"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

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.

The girl’s hair was white below the scarf, now a scarf of snow, and there was a fine rime of ice on her eyebrows. Her mouth was so numb she couldn’t have spoken even if there had been someone to speak to. She wore the snowshoes she had found back in the cabin and had brought the supplies, painkiller and bandages, whatever she might need to dress a wound. She wondered if trappers wore snowshoes. Probably not. Anyway, a trapper wouldn’t put himself through the unpleasantness of coming out in a heavy snow like this to check his traps. In New Mexico, the law was you had to check the traps every thirty-six hours, but who paid any attention? An animal trapped stayed trapped.

"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.

What begins as a trio of seemingly unrelated deaths in England soon propels Superintendent Richard Jury into an international mystery that leads him far from home—to the sun-drenched American Southwest. When three women die of “natural causes” in London and the West Country, there appears to be no connection—or reason to suspect foul play. But Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury has other ideas, and before long he’s following his keen police instincts all the way to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There, in the company of a brooding thirteen-year-old girl and her pet coyote, he mingles with an odd assortment of characters and tangles with a twisted plot that stretches from England to the American Southwest. And while his good friend Melrose Plant pursues inquires in London, Jury delves deeper into the more baffling elements of the case, discovering firsthand what the guide books don’t tell you; that the Land of Enchantment is also a landscape ripe with tragedy, treachery, and murder.

From bestselling author Martha Grimes, Detective Chief Inspector Richard Jury is back on the case in an installment in the Richard Jury Mystery series. Long Piddleton had always been wary of newcomers. But the quiet town was stunned when the first stranger was found dead, upended in a butt of ale in the cellar of the Men with a Load of Mischief. Then the second body appeared, swinging in place of the mechanical man above the door of the Jack and Hammer. Suddenly Long Piddleton had good reason to be wary of everyone! Its cozy pubs and inns with their polished pewter and blazing hearths had become scenes of the most bizarre crimes. Who were the victims? And who was the murderer? A stranger? A maniac? Or the disarmingly friendly man next door?

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.

In the new mystery in the bestselling Richard Jury series, MWA Grand Master Martha Grimes brings London''s finest and "the Filth" together on a double-homicide case that involves Kenyan art, rare gems, astrophysics, and a long-fermented act of revenge

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?

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.”

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…

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.

Detective Richard Jury is back in the 16th novel in Martha Grimes'' extraordinary New York Times bestselling series--now enmeshed in a series of strange crimes and disappearances, and an age-old tragedy that consumes his sidekick Melrose Plant....

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.

The third in the bestselling Richard Jury mystery series by Martha Grimes. A spinster whose passion was bird-watching, a dotty peer who pinched pennies, and a baffling murder made the tiny village of Littlebourne a most extraordinary place. And a severed finger made a ghastly clue in the killing that led local constables from a corpse to a boggy footpath to a beautiful lady’s mansion. But Richard Jury refused, preferring to take the less traveled route to a slightly disreputable pub, the Anodyne Necklace. There, drinks all around loosened enough tongues to link a London mugging with the Littlebourne murder and a treasure map that would chart the way to yet another chilling crime.

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.

Scotland Yard Inspector Richard Jury investigates the bizarre murder of an unidentified woman in a tiny English seaside village.

In The Old Success, the twenty-fifth mystery in the bestselling Richard Jury series by MWA Grand Master Martha Grimes, an unlikely trio of detectives teams up to solve three puzzling murders that span three counties across England.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER-NOW IN PAPERBACK

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.

Three months have passed since Richard Jury was left bereft and guilt- ridden after his lover''s tragic auto accident, and he is now more wary than ever. He is deeply suspicious when requested on a case far out of his jurisdiction in an outlying village, where a young woman has been murdered behind the local pub. The only witness is the establishment''s black cat, who gives neither crook nor clue as to the girl''s identity or her killer''s. Identifying the girl becomes tricky when she''s recognized as both the shy local librarian and a posh city escort, and Jury must use all his wits and intuition to determine the connection to subseu00adquent escort murders. Meanwhile, Jury''s nemesis, Harry Johnson, continues to goad Jury down a dangerous path. And Johnson, along with the imperturbable dog Mungo, just may be the key to it all. Written with Martha Grimes'' trademark insight and grace, The Black Cat signals the thrilling return of her greatest character. The superintendent is a man possessed of prodigious analytical gifts and charm, yet vulnerable in the most perplexing ways.

A once-fashionable now fading resort hotel. A spinster aunt living in the attic. Dirt roads that lead to dead ends. A house full of secrets and old, dusty furnishings, uninhabited for almost half a century. A twelve-year-old girl with a passion for double-chocolate ice-cream sodas, and decaying lake-fronts, and an obsession with the death by drowning of another young girl, forty years before. Hotel Paradise is a delicate yet excruciating view of the pettiness and cruelty of small town America. It is a look at the difficult decisions a young girl must make on her way to becoming an adult and the choices she must make between right and wrong, between love and truth, between life and death.

Cindy Sella struggles with writer''s block and a lawsuit by her unscrupulous former agent, L. Bass Hess, who is targeted by bumbling hitmen Candy and Karl''s zany efforts to drive him out of New York City.

When twelve-year-old Emma Graham and her friends discover the crumbling shell of a fabulous hotel hidden in the woods near her small town of Spirit Lake, Emma is determined to discover its secrets.

Featuring the two novellas: The Train Now Departing and When “The Mousetrap” Closes “Full of suspense and surprise. These carefully written little gems showcase Grimes at her best.”—Library Journal “Grimes has created a work of value here, a book that expands her art, her reputation—and possibly her audience.”—The Richmond-Times Dispatch “Atmospheric and chilling…Grimes [exhibits] a complete mastery of emotional nuance and [a] virtuoso treatment of the grayest coloration.”—The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN) “Intelligent…Merits applause.”—The Toronto Star “As atmospherically evocative as [an] Edward Hopper painting.”—The Washington Post “An a cappella novella, each note strong and noncompetitive.”—Los Angeles Times “Grimes once again demonstrates her keen eye for character. Both of these languidly paced novellas focus on middle-aged women who long for respite from their narrow, disappointing lives and find it, at least temporarily, in the company of a man…Thoughtful, compelling, even dark stories—for readers more inclined toward investigating emotions than searching for armchair adventure.”—Booklist

For waitress and cub reporter Emma Graham, tragedy defines where she lives. Spirit Lake, La Porte, and Lake Noir have been held in thrall by intertwined crimes: the murders of Mary-Evelyn Devereau, Rose Queen, and Fern Queen; the supposed kidnapping of a four-month-old baby from the Belle Ruin hotel twenty years previously; and, most recently, the attack on Emma. And with the arrival of an unexpected visitor and a drifter, it looks like the bad times have only begun...

Amnesiac Andi Oliver returns in this newest mystery from Martha Grimes. This time she is making her way through North Dakota and is hired on at a pig farming facility where she uncovers the truth about the facility and the local slaughterhouse.

A sudden murder in an English village pub sets off the twenty-sixth novel in the bestselling series starring superintendent Richard Jury, from bestselling author Martha Grimes, still “one of the most fascinating mystery writers today” (Houston Chronicle) One calm night in Twickenham, a businessman named Tom Treadnor is shot off his barstool at The Queen pub. Superintendent Richard Jury is called in to investigate, and quickly realizes that everyone in Treadnor’s life – from his widow, Alice, to the staff at his manor, to his business partner had differing opinions of him. And to complicate things further, Jury has just happened upon a photo in a newspaper of a man in the United States, who is a dead ringer for Treadnor. Meanwhile, Wiggins, Jury’s partner at New Scotland Yard, becomes sidetracked by an investigation of his own: His sister, missing for years and presumed dead, has just sent a postcard to their mother. When Wiggins takes off in search of his sister, the two investigations begin to converge. Funny, eccentric, and fueled by Richard Jury’s talent for seeing clues in the most unlikely places, The Red Queen is a welcome return to a classic character and an exciting addition to a series that has been called “delightful, surprising, even magical” (Washington Post).

Richard Jury is supposed to be on holiday when the telephone call comes. And in any case, what has sudden death on American soil to do with an English police superintendent? But when the victim turns out to be British by birth, and to have a distant connection with Jury''s old acquaintance Lady Cray, he reluctantly pries himself loose from his pint at the Jack and Hammer. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

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.