The Blue Last
Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury returns in a compelling novel,  the 17th in Grimes's long-running series. Mickey Haggerty, Jury's old friend and colleague, is dying  of cancer. So Jury can hardly refuse his request to look into what Mickey  suspects is a 50-year-old case of switched identities. It surfaces when the last  World War II bomb site in London is excavated for a new development, exposing  the skeletal remains of a woman and infant. Mickey thinks the dead infant wasn't  the baby of Kitty Riordan, Maisie Tynedale's nanny, as Kitty claimed, but was  Maisie herself, the heiress to a brewery fortune. Did Kitty engineer the  masquerade? And did Simon Croft, who was writing a book about London in the war  years, discover it? When Croft is killed and his computer stolen, Jury sends his  pal Melrose Plant to snoop around Tynedale Lodge disguised as a gardener. There  he encounters a charming trio of amateurs: a homeless urchin and his extremely  clever dog Sparky, and Gemma, a Tynedale ward whose mysterious background may  hold the clue to Simon's murder as well as the still unsolved attempt on her  young life.As usual, Plant's world of eccentric friends and relatives is nicely evoked in a  subplot that leads him on a surprising holiday in Florence, during which he  acquires just enough knowledge of Italian Renaissance painting to pull off  another disguise on Jury's behalf. Grimes weaves the threads of this rich  tapestry together in a surprise ending that not even Grimes aficionados will  sense coming. But it's an appropriate conclusion, given the book's brooding  tone, established in the opening pages by a dying friend's obsession and  sustained as the investigation forces Jury to confront his own haunted memories  of the war. This is a solid page turner, marked by Grimes's unerring sense of  pacing, respectful but provocative poking around in Jury's soul, and topnotch  storytelling ability.--Jane Adams--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.