02/12/2018
The shooting death of American physicist David Moffitt and his wife, Rebecca, outside the Artemis Club, an exclusive London casino and art gallery, propels MWA Grand Master Grimes’s solid 24th mystery featuring Scotland Yard’s Det. Supt. Richard Jury (after 2014’s Vertigo 42). Jury reads about the crime in the newspaper the next day. Meanwhile, a gritty version of the Baker Street Irregulars, children who hang out at train stations and Heathrow and act as informants, have the shooter in their sights; 10-year-old Patty Haigh befriends the killer and accompanies him to Nairobi, Kenya, where Melrose Plant, one of Jury’s team, soon follows. Jury’s investigation centers on gem smuggling, tax dodging, and greed. The real mystery is how to find a cab drivers’ pub, the Knowledge, so secret that even Scotland Yard can’t force its patrons to reveal its location. Though the plot gets a bit muddled midway through, readers will appreciate the elements that have made this a long-running bestselling series, notably a complicated case and distinctive characters. Agent: Steve Sheppard, Cowen Debaets Abrahams & Sheppard. (Apr.)
Advance praise for The Knowledge:
"Martha Grimes delivers an outstanding police procedural...Readers will find it hard to put the book down; all will be drawn in from the first sentence. This may be Martha Grimes’ finest Richard Jury mystery to date." —Bookreporter
“Jury’s investigation centers on gem smuggling, tax dodging, and greed. The real mystery is how to find a cab drivers’ pub, the Knowledge, so secret that even Scotland Yard can’t force its patrons to reveal its location . . . Readers will appreciate the elements that have made this a long-running bestselling series, notably a complicated case and distinctive characters.”—Publishers Weekly
“Grimes’ twenty-fourth mystery starring Richard Jury gets off to a breakneck start . . . Jury’s devoted readership will find much to enjoy.”—Booklist
Praise for Martha Grimes and the Richard Jury mystery series:
“Delightful, surprising, even magical. They begin as police procedurals—someone is murdered, Jury investigates—but Grimes’s love of the offbeat, the whimsical and the absurd makes them utterly unlike anyone else’s detective novels . . . Although Grimes is American she has a wicked eye for English eccentricity . . . Original, civilized and witty novels that . . . truly are novel and, once come upon, they can become necessary.”—Washington Post, on Dust
“Delicious . . . A prime example of Grimes’ skill at balancing the serious with the lighthearted . . . Jury and his posse are terrific companions . . . Delightful.”—Seattle Times, on Vertigo 42
“Intricate and entertaining . . . A delicious puzzle.”—Boston Globe, on The Horse You Came In On
“Wondrously eccentric characters . . . The details are divine.”—New York Times Book Review, on The Stargazey
“Swift and satisfying . . . grafts the old-fashioned ‘Golden Age’ amateur-detective story to the contemporary police procedural . . . real charm.”—Wall Street Journal, on The Lamorna Wink
“The literary equivalent of a box of Godiva truffles . . . Wonderful.”—Los Angeles Times, on The Stargazey
“Witty, atmospheric mysteries . . . Simply heaven.”—Denver Post, on The Stargazey
“Read any one [of her novels] and you’ll want to read them all.”—Chicago Tribune
“Grimes is not the next Dorothy Sayers, not the next Agatha Christie. She is better than both.”—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Grimes is superlative at describing the physical world . . . And, when Grimes takes us into interiors, whether it’s a posh country home or a down-at-the-heels flat, she is like Dickens in linking human character to habitat . . . A stellar series.”—Kirkus Reviews, on Vertigo 42
11/15/2017
This latest from Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Grimes opens in a London cab whose driver knows every winding byway (the title references not just a pub only black cabbies can find but the famously onerous test London cabbies must take). The passenger has just committed a crime and is planning his escape to Nairobi. Enter D.S. Richard Jury.
2018-01-23
Detective Superintendent Richard Jury (Vertigo 42, 2014, etc.) joins with the usual friends and relations and a covey of London black cab drivers to unravel a spectacularly public double murder.Moments after cabbie Robbie Parsons drops American astrophysicist David Moffit and his beautiful British wife, Rebecca, in front of the Artemis Club, the exclusive casino/art gallery run by enterprising Leonard Zane, a man steps out of nowhere and shoots the two visitors dead. Even more remarkably, he gets into Robbie's cab, takes it to Waterloo Station, and catches a train to Heathrow without breaking a sweat. Unbeknownst to his passenger, Robbie has alerted his buddies in the black-cab network, and one of them, Patty Haigh, follows the shooter, steals a ticket for his flight to Dubai, chats him up, and ends up traveling in the next first-class pod. Patty, the latest in a long line of Grimes' tough, unflappable, endlessly resourceful preteen female heroes, reflects of her companion, who's booked passage under the name Bushiri Banerjee, that "for somebody who shoots people, he was pretty nice." Meanwhile, back in London, Jury is dispatching his old friend Melrose Plant to Nairobi, where Banerjee has flown from Dubai, and planted antiques dealer Marshall Trueblood as a dealer in the Artemis Club while Jury himself tries to figure out why Banerjee felt the need to shoot both Moffits and how their murders might be connected to the remarkably coincidental shooting of one Danny Morrissey in the Metropole, the Reno hotel Zane also owned, eight years ago. Many more coincidences will follow—some actually coincidental, others not so much—seriously denting but never wrecking the mystery at the core of a whimsically digressive adventure in which Jury has to fight for attention, let alone resolution.Grimes' endlessly fertile imagination conjures up new people, places, and episodes that you'll want to hear all about however tangential they end up being to the dubious case that's supposed to tie them all together.
This well-realized novel, narrated by Steve West, was inspired by “The Knowledge”—the encyclopedic information about the city of London that its most prestigious cab drivers possess. When a couple is murdered outside an exclusive casino, Detective Inspector Richard Jury calls his usual sidekicks, Melrose Plant and Marshall Trueblood, into action. West makes both sound appropriately aristocratic and witty. Shortly after, when a cab driver is kidnapped by the murderer, he secretly alerts fellow cabbies and street kids (like the Baker Street Irregulars) to follow his car. Listeners will feel they’re in the cab and at the airport when the killer departs. Most riveting is 10-year-old Patty Haigh, who manages to board the flight and follow the killer all the way to to Kenya. West’s delivery of her street smarts is mind-blowing and hilarious. Genuine sound effects and West’s impressive accents add to the listening pleasure. S.G.B. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine