Two more of Martha Grimes' Inspector Jury novels were this year's summer reading for me, but neither of them what was for most people constitutes a typical holiday read.
On the building site in London where a pub stood until it was bombed in WWII, two skeletons are found from that time. To the family who used to own the pub (“The Blue Last”), it is clear that it can only be the daughter of the former owner and the nanny’s baby girl – she had taken out the daughter’s child for a walk when the bombing happened, sadly losing her own child in the process.
Richard Jury’s old friend and fellow detective asks him to investigate what he believes could be an old case of identity swap.
For Jury, this means facing his own past; as a little boy, he lost his Mum in a bombing after he’d already lost his father in the war, and ended up in care homes – not a childhood memory he wants to revisit, but can’t avoid either.
As he starts talking to the family members of the former pub owner, he discovers that one of them is writing a book about “The Blue Last” and has been doing extensive research.
Not long afterwards, the man is found dead, and his computer as well as his notes are missing, while nothing else has been taken from his luxurious home.
What had he come across in his research that could have cost him his life?
While Jury keeps investigating and finding motives and suspects, a parallel storyline involes a 9-year-old girl who nobody in her family’s big house is much inclined to talk about and whose provenience is mysterious.
A 12-year-old boy is her best friend, but he has a big secret of his own to guard while at the same time juggling all sorts of odd jobs. His dog plays a role, too…
The cleverly constructed story reunites the reader with many of the familiar cast, introducing some new ones who may or may not make a reappearance in later books, as is Martha Grimes’ habit with the Inspector Jury series.
It ends with Jury solving the case (of course), nearly losing his life in the process and finding out things about his old friend he’d never thought possible.
The Grave Maurice
This time it’s all about horses, breeding and racing. Jury knows nothing about it really, but he is asked a personal favour by the doctor who’s been treating him in hospital after he nearly died at the end of the previous book:
Almost two years ago, the doctor's 15-year-old daughter disappeared from her grandfather’s stables, where she was spending the night to be near a sick horse, which also disappeared. No ransom was ever asked, and while the police treat it as a cold case and presume that the girl must be dead, her family have been paying a private investigator to find out what happened, and at least some of them seem to be certain that she’s still alive.
Out of hospital but still officially on sick leave, Jury takes on the case and finds things getting more and more curious.
His friend Melrose is roped in to pose as an expert on race horses (just as he had him pose as an expert gardener in “The Blue Last”) so that he can get up close and personal with some of the people possibly involved in the case.
As usual, most characters have more than one secret, some more, some less relevant to the missing girl.
Also as usual, in the end Jury manages to unravel the thicket of lies and motives, but although he solves the mystery of the missing girl and horse, it is a sad ending.
When I found these and the other Inspector Jury books at a second hand sale, I had to take what was there but was lucky to get these two in direct chronological order.
The two children playing important roles in “The Blue Last” reappear in “The Grave Maurice”, as do of course the entire cast of Long Piddleton (Melrose’s home village) as well as Richard Jury’s neighbours in Islington.
I really enjoyed both books, although The Grave Maurice left me sad. Jury almost dying at the end of “The Blue Last”, didn't have me worry; I knew he wasn’t dead, because the series continued. But when the book was first published, readers probably weren’t so sure more stories would follow.
Now I have finished all the Jury books I have bought at the sale, but I have one or two more by Martha Grimes on my shelf, plus three paperbacks I bought in Ripon.
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