The Grave Maurice
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"Chew on this," says Melrose Plant to Richard Jury, who's in the hospital being driven crazy by Hannibal, a nurse who likes to speculate on his chances for survival. Jury could use a good story, preferably one not ending with his own demise.
Plant tells Jury of something he overheard in The Grave Maurice, a pub near the hospital. A woman told an intriguing story about a girl named Nell Ryder, granddaughter to the owner of the Ryder Stud Farm in Cambridgeshire, who went missing more than a year before and has never been found. What is especially interesting to Plant is that Nell is also the daughter of Jury's surgeon.
But Nell's disappearance isn't the only mystery at the Ryder farm. A woman has been found dead on the track-a woman who was a stranger even to the Ryders.
But not to Plant. She's the woman he saw in The Grave Maurice. Together with Jury, Nell's family, and the Cambridgeshire police, Plant embarks on a search to find Nell and bring her home. But is there more to their mission than just restoring a fifteen-year-old girl to her family?
The Grave Maurice is the eighteenth entry in the Richard Jury series and, from its pastoral opening to its calamitous end, is full of the same suspense and humor that devoted readers expect from Martha Grimes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the 18th entry in this popular series (after 2001's The Blue Last), Grimes serves up a convoluted hodgepodge of rape, kidnapping and murder, then throws in corporate greed, animal rights issues and assorted satires of modern British society. Supt. Jury is hospitalized following a shooting in an earlier case. His aristocratic assistant, Melrose Plant (aka Lord Ardry) overhears two women in a pub curiously called the Grave Maurice discussing the disappearance of horse enthusiast Nell Ryder, who turns out to be the daughter of Jury's doctor, the first of many implausible coincidences. Nell's devoted 16-year-old cousin, who's also named Maurice, has been in a grave mood following Nell's apparent abduction. This poor lad must also cope with his father's death, his mother's flight to America and a growth spurt that has left him too tall to be a jockey, his life's ambition. Most of this long and winding tale deals with the world of horse racing and its seamier sides. Pregnant mares are being badly treated at a stud farm where their urine is collected for a commercial menopause drug. People and prize thoroughbreds get snatched away in the night, and, to the dismay of his elders, a greedy stepbrother has left the Ryder farm to peddle IPOs in London. Jury's investigation gets off to a tardy start, by which time Plant has dug himself in deep, even buying his own horse to try to understand the lore of racing. Frequent digressions divert the sleuths (and the reader) from the investigative trail.
