The Old Fox Deceiv'd

In Rackmoor, a Yorkshire fishing village, the twelfth night of Christmas comes to a dramatic and disturbing end when the corpse of a young woman is discovered. Once again, Inspector Jury's assistance is required.





However, Jury finds himself struggling at the first hurdle - the girl's identity - and learns that, before he can grapple with the village's future, and even its present, he must first face confront its past which turns out to be a tangled maze of unrequited loves, unrevenged wrongs, and even undiscovered murders.





Who was this girl? Was she Gemma Temple, an impostor, or was she really Dillys March, Colonel Titus Crael's long-lost ward, returning after eight years to the Colonel's country seat to claim a share of his fortune? And who could possibly want her dead...?



Martha Grimes is a self-acclaimed Anglophile who has been publishing a book (and sometimes two) every year for the past twenty-five years.





Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Grimes earned her BA and MA from the University of Maryland. Though she is best known for her detective fiction series that features Richard Jury, a Scotland Yard inspector, Martha Grimes is the author of two further book series - the Andi Oliver series and the Emma Graham series - as well as a collection of poems, a short story and a further two novels.





In 1983, Grimes was the recipient of the Nero Wolfe Award for the best mystery of the year for The Anodyne Necklace. In 2012, she was awarded the title of Grand Master by The Edgar Awards Mystery Writers of America.



One of the established masters of the genre.



[Grimes's] gift for evoking mood and emotion is as keen as her talent for inventing a demanding puzzle, and solving it.



[Grimes] excels at creating a haunting atmosphere and characters both poignant and preposterous.



Grimes is gifted at exploring the private, sometimes horrifying, yet utterly mundane thoughts of ordinary people.



Read any one [of her novels] and you'll want to read them all.



Grimes's love of the offbeat, the whimsical and the absurd makes [the Richard Jury series] utterly unlike anyone else's detective novels.



Grimes is not the next Dorothy Sayers, not the next Agatha Christie. She is better than both.