One just really has to get used to Martha Grimes' style to fu...lly appreciate, if not always love, her Richard Jury series. For me, the characters are wonderful, the English settings and detail more so. The plots, however, are often contrived (certainly this one was!) and almost always entangled with Jury's morose romanticism and Melrose Plant's foppish intellectualism. In this, the 18th in the series, Jury, off duty due to a shooting in the prior installment, investigates the disappearance of the teenage daughter of his surgeon, part of the Ryder thoroughbred dynasty. The story is intermingled with stream of consciousness in a horse's mind, passionate recollections of great race horses and races and always the thin line between propriety, passion and obsession. Of course, Jury meets his requisite femme fatale accompanied by dreamy sequences worthy of an acid flashback. Of course, Jury solves the crime through his combination of intuition and memory. But the whole tale is just not important or even clever. Making this point would ruin the plot, but it just wasn't worth it. We get all the requisite banter among Melrose Plant's group with their neverending drinking and pontificating over nonsense. It just seems somehow less charming while real people live and die all around them.
Great addition to the Richard Jury series! LOVE t...he horses in these stories; adds a dreamlike feeling that takes me back.....
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
