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Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:"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..… (more)
User reviews
Oh well, I guess that is bitterness speaking- the feelings of someone who was a wholly unremarkable, cliched teenager...
Entertaining, just not quite as compelling as her previous novels were to me.
To distract Jury, Plant tells him of a conversation he overheard at the Grave Maurice, across the street from the hospital.
Plant sits to the bar and overhears two women talking. They were discussing about someone named Ryder and that he was a “poor sod” as his daughter had disappeared about two years ago. Then a comment was made about a brother and he’d been killed. Only bits and pieces, but it interests Plant. And it turns out Jury’s doctor is the “poor sod” and asks if Jury would look into the matter “unofficially.”
Jury is released from hospital with instructions to rest, but he immediately starts investigating. The case is stone cold, but little by little Jury gets bits and pieces, tying them together.
It turns out the girl’s disappearance isn’t the only mystery. There is the death of the doctor’s brother during a race in Paris and the mysterious goings on at a nearby stud farm. Somehow they seem related.
This is not a book to race through. The clues are not always obvious and neither are the connections.