As the New York Times–bestselling series continues, a double murder in front of an exclusive club takes a London detective on a wild ride.
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 art gallery-cum-casino, then jumped in and ordered Parsons to drive. As the criminal eventually escapes to Nairobi, Detective Superintendent Richard Jury comes across the case in the Saturday paper.
Two days previously, Jury had met and instantly connected with one of the victims of the crime, a professor of astrophysics at Columbia and an expert gambler. Feeling personally affronted, Jury soon enlists Melrose Plant, Marshall Trueblood, and his whole gang of merry characters to contend with a case that takes unexpected turns into Tanzanian gem mines, a closed casino in Reno, Nevada, and a pub that only London’s black cabbies, those who have “the knowledge,” can find. The Knowledge is prime fare from “one of the most fascinating mystery writers today” (Houston Chronicle).
“Grimes’ twenty-fourth mystery starring Richard Jury gets off to a breakneck start. . . . Besides the fast action, it’s fascinating to see how Robbie uses a London’s cabdriver’s deep familiarity with the streets to keep himself alive. . . . Jury’s devoted readership will find much to enjoy.” —Booklist
“Solid. . . . Readers will appreciate the elements that have made this a long-running bestselling series, notably a complicated case and distinctive characters.” —Publishers Weekly
“Martha Grimes’ Richard Jury returns in a new mystery that is every bit as clever and suspenseful as her others. The plot is intriguing and unusual, featuring the usual cast of characters Grimes fans have come to know and love, as well as a set of streetwise, worldly children that could have come straight out of a Dickens novel.” —Patricia Uttaro, Rochester Public Library
Martha Grimes is the bestselling author of more than thirty books, twenty-four of them featuring Richard Jury. The recipient of the 2012 Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award, Grimes lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
As soon as he ceased to be of any use to this bastard, the guy would shoot him.
So Robbie Parsons had to keep on being of use.
He was glad he’d earned his medallion; he was grateful for all of those months of routing and re-routing himself around London that had qualified him to drive a black cab.
Robbie had maps in his mind. He would entertain himself, while cruising around looking for a fare, by setting destinations involving landmarks he would either have to pass or not pass in the course of getting to a certain location. Maps in his mind, so no matter where this black guy told him to go (and he’d told him nothing thus far), Robbie knew how to take the longest way round without raising suspicions. The guy behind him wasn’t a Londoner, but then most Londoners didn’t know sod-all about London, anyway.
Greetings, gumshoes! March may have gone out like a lamb, but April’s new crop of mysteries is roaring in. From a gritty retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth by the peerless Jo Nesbø, to the story of a long-lost daughter whose sudden reappearance brings nothing but trouble, this month’s crop of whodunits is ready to surprise you […]
