Product Description

As he leans over the body of an unidentified five-year-old girl shot in the back on a shabby London street, Superintendent Richard Jury knows he’ll be facing one of the saddest investigations of his life. His colleague DI Johnny Blakeley, head of the pedophile unit of NSY, thinks he knows where this child came from—an iniquitous house on that same street, owned by well-known financier Viktor Baumann and fronted by a woman named Murchison. Blakeley has been trying to wreck their operation for a long time.

While examining the body of an unidentified woman murdered in the gardens of Declan Scott’s estate, Angel Gate, Brian Macalvie, commander of the Devon and Cornwall police, realizes he’s been here before. Three years prior, Declan’s stepdaughter, four- year-old Flora, was abducted while she and her mother Mary were visiting the Lost Gardens of Heligan. Shortly after that, Mary Scott herself died, and Declan was devastated by the loss of his child and his wife.

"He really doesn’t need a body in his garden," says Macalvie.

Joined by the intrepid Melrose Plant, now a gardener at Angel Gate, Jury and Macalvie rake over the present and the past in a pub near Launceston called the Winds of Change. With one of their most serpentine investigations under way, all signs point to the guilt of Viktor Baumann, Mary Scott’s first husband and Flora’s father. But when no one in this case is exactly who he seems, how can Jury be sure?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #484862 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-19
• Released on: 2004-08-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

From Publishers Weekly
For Richard Jury, the death of his cousin—apparently his one link to his childhood—generates "an emptiness that he hadn't seen coming" and supplies an existential, melancholic subtext to this 19th outing for the New Scotland Yard detective (after 2002's The Grave Maurice). Bestseller Grimes's finely written, if at times baffling, novel is propelled by an unthinkably horrific crime: an unidentified five-year-old girl is shot dead in a London street. Her autopsy reveals sexual abuse and leads to a London pedophile ring. The girl may be connected to Flora, the abducted child of a particularly loathsome businessman, Viktor Baumann. Three years earlier, during a nasty custody battle with Baumann's ex-wife, four-year-old Flora was kidnapped near her home in Devon. When the unidentified body of a woman turns up on the estate of Flora's putative stepfather, Declan Scott, the convoluted plot begins to come together. Fans will welcome the appearance of Jury's gaggle of humorously eccentric friends and neighbors, including Melrose Plant, who goes undercover as a gardener to ferret out information. In the end, Grimes fails to connect the dots as well as she might have, but that won't prevent this engaging novel from hitting lots of bestseller lists.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
His hospital experience (Grave Maurice, 2002) may still be fresh in his mind, but Scotland Yard's Richard Jury wastes no time in involving himself in another case, the murder of an anonymous five-year-old girl, shot in the back. Who could have done such a thing? When he learns that the child was found near a house frequented by pedophiles, he's convinced there's a link. His suspicions grow stronger when the man supposedly behind the operation turns out to be the father of a child who mysteriously disappeared three years before from a country estate. Intuition isn't proof, however, and Jury enlists the aid of his friend Melrose Plant, Lord Ardry, to help him work through the connections. Discussions frequently bring either or both to a local pub, called the Winds of Change. Grimes works in her usual complement of British literary allusions and smartly juxtaposes Plant's easygoing manner and sardonic wit (his unintentional ability to provoke contrariness in children and animals is laugh-out-loud funny) against Jury's somewhat solemn, ruminative personality. As it turns out, nothing is quite what it seems at the beginning in this stellar entry in an outstanding series. Stephanie Zvirin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Grimes is gifted at exploring the private, sometimes horrifying, yet utterly mundane thoughts of ordinary people. -- San Francisco Chronicle

One of the established masters of the genre. -- Newsweek

[Grimes] excels at creating a haunting atmosphere and characters both poignant and preposterous. -- USA Today

[Grimes’s] gift for evoking mood and emotion is as keen as her talent for inventing a demanding puzzle. -- The Wall Street Journal

Customer Reviews

Not the best in the series
Martha Grimes is back with another entry in the Richard Jury series. This book revolves around three murders, a little girl shot found shot the in the head, the death of Jury's cousin, his last living relative, and the death of a strange woman found in the garden of house named Angel Gate. The owner of the Angel Gate's young stepdaughter vanished three years ago, but is not the little girl who was found shot.

Much of this story is introspective for Richard Jury as he examines his feelings about the death of his cousin who he had really never liked in life. That part of the book was very slow moving for me and ultimately did not work. Melrose Plant, a fixture in many prior Jury books was brought into this story, but seemed to be so extraneous that it seemed ridiculous. If you a fan of Richard Jury, then I would recommend reading it, but for others the prior Jury novels are much better. This one was a bit of a chore to get through.

It seems too long between Richard Jury novels.
I am a HUGE fan of Martha Grimes, and I eagerly await each new addition to her long-running Richard Jury series. I really enjoyed this newest book in the series. Jury has matured and developed into a wonderful character, and there are still the wonderful eccentric secondary characters in this book (although we don't see too much of the Jack and Hammer crowd this time round). But we do see Melrose Plant, and he is as usual a wonderful foil for Jury's broodiness and solitariness. Ms. Grimes also does such a wonderful job with children in her stories, and this book is no exception. The indomitable Lulu is a treat! But the story behind the mystery is not so agreeable. Ms. Grimes has tread where angels fear to go with this book. She enters the seedy world of the up-scale pedophile. As usual she handles this odious subject with her usual painter's hand, and it puts us right there with Jury and Macalvie as they try to solve a number of cases that all seem connected - the disappearance of a small girl three years ago, the death of a woman on a country estate in Cornwall and a pedophile ring that has escaped the law for far too long. Nothing is as it seems (as is usual in a Richard Jury mystery), but boy do we have a lot of fun getting there in the end. Martha Grimes is a wonderful author.

A dark, brooding entry into the Jury Series
I am a huge fan of the Richard Jury series. I found this entry darker and deeper than most and ultimately quite satisfying.

In many ways, the book is a series of meditations on childhood. Not happy childhoods, of course (this is Martha Grimes)--but ones that are troubled, have undercurrents, or end suddenly and violently.

The book opens with the murder of a five year old child. In the early part of the book, Jury links the murder to a home of pedophilia near the site. In an interesting twist, the alleged backer of the pedophiliac brothel has also lost his daughter through a suspected kidnapping several years before. Jury begins connecting the dots and his journey takes him to some seamy and sordid venues. In addition, Jury himself has recently lost his last relative, a cousin, who had challenged his memories of his sad, orphaned childhood in the near past.

Jury's circle of eccentric friends--Melrose Plant, Aunt Agatha et al.--make all too brief appearances. The book is a bit too dark to have too much of their lighthearted banter.

I definitely enjoyed this installment of the Jury series. At times, I felt Grimes could have linked the plots and the sub-plots better; however, overall, it is a very satisfying read.