Martha Grimes

"When the body of a French woman washes up on a wild inlet off the Cornish coast, Brian Macalvie, divisional commander with the Devon-Cornwall police is called in. Who could have killed this beautiful tourist, the only visible footprints nearby belonging to the two little girls who found her? While Macalvie reexamines the scene in the Scilly Islands, inspector Richard Jury-twenty miles away on Land's End-is at The Old Success pub, sharing a drink...

"In the latest series outing, The Knowledge, the Scotland Yard detective nearly meets his match in a Baker Street Irregulars-like gang of kids and a homicide case that reaches into east Africa. Robbie Parsons is one of London's finest, a black cab driver who knows every street, every theater, every landmark in the city by heart. In his backseat is a man with a gun in his hand--a man who brazenly committed a crime in front of the Artemis Club, a rarefied...

"November. In a bleak month, a bleak Richard Jury takes an aimless ride on one of London's icons--the old double-decker bus, a #14 traveling the Fulham Road. His attention is caught by a woman 'with hair so gossamer-pale you could see the moon through it,' wearing a fur coat, boarding his bus in front of a pub called the Stargazey"--

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 a dismembered corpse is found in the compartments of an antique secretaire a abattant, 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,...

While sitting in a London pub Richard Jury hears a story told by Harry Johnson about the disappearance of a good friend's wife and son (and dog). The vanished woman's husband excels in the esoteric subject of quantum mechanics, could this explain the disappearance? The dog did come back but how and from where?

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, the fens, a landscape that volunteers nothing, as if to say, a landscape that volunteers nothing, as to say, You're on your own, mate–much like the habitues of the only pub for miles around called The Case Has...

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...