The Winds of Change

When an unidentified five-year-old girl is shot on a grimy street in London, Jury knows this will be one of the hardest investigations of his career. He is joined by his colleague DI Johnny Blakeley, head of the paedophile unit of New Scotland Yard, who suspects Viktor Baumann, owner of an iniquitous house on the same street - an operation Blakeley has been long trying to shut down.





Meanwhile, at Angel Gate, where Jury's trusty sidekick, Melrose Plant, is now a gardener, an unidentified woman has been murdered in the grounds of Declan Scott's estate. First on the scene is commander of the Devon and Cornwall police, Brian Macalvie. Three years earlier, Declan Scott's four-year-old stepdaughter, Flora, was abducted and shortly after her disappearance, her mother died too, leaving Declan bereft.





Together Jury, Macalvie, Blakeley and Plant rake over the past and the present and find that all sign posts point to the guilt of Viktor Baumann, who happens to be Flora's father. But when no one in this case is exactly who they seem, how can Jury be sure?



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.



Grimes is a gorgeous writer whose lyrical evocation of the lost innocence of the past invests her strange stories with the aura of grown-up fairy tales.



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.