The Blue Last: A Richard Jury Mystery

The City, London's famous square mile, is home to merchant bankers & brokers & maintains its own police force. Chief Inspector Michael Haggerty asks his old friend Richard Jury to do him a favor: prove that the granddaughter of the brewing magnate Oliver Tynedale is an impostor & that the real granddaughter was killed, along with her mother, in the London blitz when a bomb hit a pub called the Blue Last. The pub's location was the last bomb site in London & only recently bought by a developer. Excavation turns up two skeletons--those of a young woman & a very young child. "I don't get it, Mickey; you're a better cop than I am." "Maybe. But I'll be dead." Mickey has incurable cancer. Mickey also has a murder to solve in the City: Simon Croft, a merchant banker & the son of the late Francis Croft, Oliver Tynedale's business partner & one-time owner of the Blue Last. To get eyes & ears inside Tynedale Lodge, where the nanny who purportedly saved the baby's life still lives, Jury asks Melrose Plant to take on the job & the guise of undergardener. "I don't do floors, I don't do flowers, I don't know the difference between a hog & a hedgerow." He does it, of course, & is accompanied on his rounds by the irrepressible six-year-old Gemma Trimm & a resourceful twelve-year-old delivery boy named Benny Keagan & his dog Sparky. Questions remain: Is someone really trying to murder Gemma? She thinks so. Was Simon Croft shot because of something he discovered in the course of writing a book about the Second World War? Jury thinks so. And is the painting Marshall Trueblood carts around Tuscany--dragging Plant with him--really an original Masaccio? Only Trueblood thinks so. The Blue Last is vintage Grimes--crowded with eccentric characters & atmospheric, humorous, & hauntingly sad.Grimes, Martha is the author of 'The Blue Last: A Richard Jury Mystery' with ISBN 9780670030040 and ISBN 067003004X.