Vertigo 42

Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury returns in this witty, intricate entry in Martha Grimes’s bestselling British mystery series: “Martha Grimes has written a whodunit with terrific characters and a grand plot mixed with her unique droll wit. Vertigo 42 is one smart mystery” (Susan Isaacs, bestselling author of Goldberg Variations).

Richard Jury is meeting Tom Williamson at Vertigo 42, a bar on the forty-second floor of an office building in London’s financial district. Despite inconclusive evidence, Tom is convinced his wife, Tess, was murdered seventeen years ago. The inspector in charge of the case was sure Tess’s death was accidental—a direct result of vertigo—but the official police inquiry is still an open verdict, and Jury agrees to reopen the cold case.

Jury learns that a nine-year-old girl fell to her death five years before Tess at the same place in Devon where Tess died, at a small house party. Jury seeks out the five surviving party guests, who are now adults, hoping they can shed light on this bizarre coincidence. Ultimately, four deaths—two in the past, two that occur on the pages of this intricate, compelling police procedural—keep Richard Jury and his sidekick Sergeant Wiggins running from their homes in Islington to the countryside in Devon and to London as they try to determine whether the deaths were accidental—and whether they are connected.

Witty and well-written, with literary references from Thomas Hardy to Yeats and a nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Vertigo 42 is a page-turning English mystery from a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master.