Richard Jury mysteries

Set in West Yorkshire and Cornwall, this story challenges Martha Grimes's major character, Superintendent Richard Jury, to find out the real reason that a perfectly sane and patient wife should murder her husband ten years after their only child has been kidnapped and presumably killed.

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. Enlisting the aid of aristocratic Melrose Plant, and accompanied by Sergeant...

"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,...

"The dog came back."
"This is a joke, right?"
"No, it isn't…So do you want to hear the rest of it?" Dumbly, Jury nodded.
The rest of it is told by Harry Johnson, who sits down by Richard Jury in the tavern, The Old Wine Shades. Over three successive nights, Harry spins out this story of a good friend of his whose wife and son (and dog) disappeared one day when they were Surrey. No trace, no clue, no lead...

The inimitable Richard Jury returns in a thrilling tale of mystery, madness, and mistaken identity. Written with Grimes's trademark insight and grace, "The Black Cat" signals the thrilling return of her greatest character.

"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...