The Grave Maurice

From the confines of his hospital bed, Inspector Jury is seeking refuge from Nurse Hannibal's constant speculations about his chances of survival when his friend, and partner in crime (prevention), Melrose Plant, arrives with a distraction. It's a story he overheard a young woman telling in The Grave Maurice about a girl named Nell Ryder - granddaughter to the owner of the Ryder Stud Farm in Cambridgeshire who has been missing for more than a year. More interestingly though, she is the daughter of Jury's surgeon.





In the wake of this discovery, a woman is found dead on the Ryders' farm - a stranger to the Ryders, but not to Plant. She is the woman he overheard in The Grave Maurice.





Together with Jury, Nell's family, and the Cambridgeshire police, Plant embarks on a search to find Nell and bring her home. But is there more to their mission than just restoring a fifteen-year-old girl to her family?



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.



Beguiling characters...blissful setting.



Wickedly clever...fans will rejoice.



Plenty of wit, danger, and fully rounded characters.



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.