Description
The Lincolnshire fens are the perfect setting for a mystifying double-murder in Martha Grimes's new Richard Jury case, a setting hardly likely to take Sergeant Wiggins's mind off his sinuses, off his pills, tinctures, and bromides. Jury finds it is a landscape that resists revealing its secrets when the body of a woman is found on the Wash and, two weeks later, the body of another woman is found floating in a canal in Windy Fen. Both women are connected with the Fengate estate: one, a kitchen maid there, and the other, the louche ex-wife of the owner, Max Owen, a man with a passion for antiques. Since the case officially belongs to the Lincolnshire police, Jury needs someone inside Fengate, someone who can impersonate an antiques expert. Someone like Melrose Plant, detective manque and yet another member of Martha Grimes's cast of deliciously eccentric characters. Jury's interest in this case is personal, for the principal suspect is Jenny Kennington, a woman who has stood at the periphery of Jury's life for years and whom he now wants in it.Publishers WeeklyGrimes is dazzling in this deftly plotted, 13th Richard Jury mystery (the last was Rainbow's End, 1995). Psychologically complex and muted in tone, with the characters' elliptical relationships reflecting the setting of England's dreamlike fen country, the novel also boasts Grimes's delicious wit. Most of her eccentric regulars are here: detective-manque Melrose Plant, Lord Ardry; his infuriating Aunt Agatha; hypochondriac Sgt. Wiggins; pompous antiquarian Marshall Trueblood. Jennifer Kennington, the woman whom Jury has loved, mainly from afar, for 10 years is the prime suspect in two murders. One victim is her cousin, Verna Dunn, with whom she was a guest at the antiques-strewn estate of Verna's ex-husband, Max Owen, and his second wife; the other is the Owens' servant, Dorcas Reese. The Lincolnshire police haven't requested Scotland Yard's help, so Jury, unofficially allying himself with the enigmatic local chief inspector, persuades Melrose to investigate by visiting the Owens as an antiques appraiser. Jury's breakthrough in identifying the real murderer follows a chat with a signature Grimes character, a knowing, elfin child named Zel whose companion is a nondescript dog. In a comic subplot, Melrose's litigious aunt sues a used furniture dealer, claiming she was injured tripping on an antique bedpan in front of the shop and then attacked by the shopowner's terrier. The title, as always, the name of a pub, holds the clue. After Jury's last two disappointing appearances, both set in America, Grimes brings him triumphantly back where he belongs.
