Discount Price: $4.99
Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780451412522
ISBN number: 0451412524
Label: Onyx
Manufacturer: Onyx
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: August 28, 2007
Publishing house: Onyx
Sale Popularity Level: 88203
Studio: Onyx
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Two pubs in Long Piddleton are the sights of two murders. Scotland Yard's Richard Jury gets some help from Long Piddleton's own Melrose Plant to root out evil in the heart of the village.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
As the very first of the Jury series, this is a great place to start with Martha Grimes. Wonderfully written and a lot of fun to read.
Rated by buyers -
My wife has been a fan of the Richard Jury mysteries for some time so I finally decided to give them a try, and this is the very first in the series. Chief Inspector Jury, a homicide specialist at Scotland Yard who should have been a Superintendent by now but doesn't want to be relegated to a desk job, is a first-rate detective and something of a loner. He's called to a village in Northamptonshire to deal with two murders committed a week apart, each in a different pub. The mystery itself is pretty well done -- the author doesn't give anything away and the "whodunit," when it finally arrives, is perfectly believable -- but Grimes's métier is creating interesting, fully realized characters. There's Jury himself, there's Melrose Plant, a very intelligent ex-earl who lives in the village and who involves himself in the investigation, there's Plant's Aunt Agatha, who's lucky no one has strangled her before this, and there's the hypochondriac Sgt. Wiggins, who sometimes shows a surprising side. Those are the series regulars, or will be. The various suspects -- and there's a lot of them -- are also well thought out and Grimes has a nice ear for the ironic turn of phrase. On top of all that, she slips in some fascinating bits about the history of various public house names, one of which supplies the title of each book in the series. My only complaint is that the author has a sloppy grasp of chronology: Jury is supposed to be about forty years old in the present day (1981), so he was born about 1941 -- but he also is described as having been seven years old when his mother was killed in the last year of the Blitz, which is also 1941.
Rated by buyers 
-
This is the very first of the Inspector Jury mysteries. My own debut with the series was one of the most recent books, Winds of Change. I enjoyed that greatly, but I found the large cast of characters a bit of a strain on the memory, so I subsequent chose the very first of all, expecting to be introduced to the main characters in a systematic way. To some extent I have been, but Ms Grimes doesn't really do systematic introductions. Jury, Melrose Plant and the others ease their way on to the scene rather than make any highlighted entrance. However with another volume in the series behind me I was better attuned to what to expect, and I coped better with the extensive character-list this time.
One thing that helped was that so many people in this story are murdered that there are fewer to keep tabs on as the book progresses. Indeed unless I'm mistaken the author herself loses count of exactly how many. Another intriguing feature is that the story has actually two heroes, Jury himself and the elegant aristocratic dilettante Melrose Plant, formerly Viscount this and Baron that before he resigned his titles out of boredom. Otherwise the style is a rather brilliant pastiche of the traditional English whodunit, as practised most famously by Agatha Christie. American spelling is used (vise, gray, fiber, checkbook) but otherwise it would be hard to tell that the author was not another English Rose herself, except for an oddly nonchalant attitude to geography that I had also noticed in Winds of Change - she appears to think that Northamptonshire, which is in the south Midlands, is somewhere in northern England. Like Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle she has a penchant for bachelors as making the best detectives, although there is one solitary reference, never elaborated, to some one called Maggie who haunts Jury's memory, and I have to hope that this was someone who had formed part of his personal life and not the prime minister at the time of the book's creation.
The book is light reading, but there are one or two good phrases and more than one or two striking perceptions that suggest to me that Grimes has depths to her that may be more apparent in her other kinds of fiction. The story-line is a genuine page-turner, I found, and the final denouement is an excellent specimen of the over-the-top genre, more familiar these days from detective series on television than from Christie and her generation. The atmosphere evokes the picture-postcard kind of English village, still without ethnic minorities or cut-price housing developments, that Christie's Miss Marple would have recognised, and the place-names are at least a brave endeavor at English nomenclature. As far as the dialogue goes, Grimes seems to me to have a very good ear indeed, to the extent that even Plant's American whodunit-writing aunt talks in the general English manner, despite her difficulties with some people's names.
This is a more straightforward detective story than the much more recent Winds of Change. The narrative is all focused on the plot-line without diverging into the deeper recesses of Jury's or anyone else's personality and deeper thoughts, although there are a few displays of erudition just to give a distinctive feel to it all. I'd say that a genuine distinctiveness is what I like best about Martha Grimes, so far as I have got to know her by this stage, and it appears likely that she values this quality herself, to judge from the scorn heaped on the derivative efforts of one author in the course of the story. Her large following do not need me to tell them what to look for or what to admire, but for newcomers like myself I would say start at the beginning - with this book. Apart from anything else, I found myself admiring the adeptness with which this American writer has captured a particularly English type of style without affectation or artificiality. If you like this sort of thing, you should find this a fine example of the sort of thing you like.
Rated by buyers -
This was as good an effort as Martha Grimes has made.
Rated by buyers 
-
I did not like this book. It seemed like something a high school student would have written. Several other reviewers mentioned that they like the characters. I found them boring. I much prefer the characters in Elizabeth Peters series of Amelia Peabody mysteries about Egypt, or the Rumpole series by John Mortimer.
Find other books like this one:
