Synopses & Reviews
The spirit of Christie, Allingham, and Sayers lives on. (Los Angeles Times)
Grimes nimbly orchestrates the suspense, giving the reader a sense of impending disaster. (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)
Grimes is gifted at exploring the private, sometimes horrifying, yet utterly mundane thoughts of ordinary people. (Patricia Holt, San Francisco Chronicle)
The City, Londons famous square mile, is home to merchant bankers and brokers and maintains its own police force. Chief Inspector Michael Haggerty asks his old friend Richard Jury to do him a favor: prove that the granddaughter of the brewing magnate Oliver Tynedale is an impostor and that the real granddaughter was killed, along with her mother, in the London blitz when a bomb hit a pub called the Blue Last. The pubs location was the last bomb site in London and only recently bought by a developer. Excavation turns up two skeletonsthose of a young woman and a very young child.
I dont get it, Mickey; youre a better cop than I am.
Maybe. But Ill be dead.
Mickey has incurable cancer.
Mickey also has a murder to solve in the City: Simon Croft, a merchant banker and the son of the late Francis Croft, Oliver Tynedales business partner and one-time owner of the Blue Last.
To get eyes and ears inside Tynedale Lodge, where the nanny who purportedly saved the babys life still lives, Jury asks Melrose Plant to take on the job and the guise of undergardener. I dont do floors, I dont do flowers, I dont know the difference between a hog and a hedgerow. He does it, of course, and is accompanied on his rounds by the irrepressible six-year-old Gemma Trimm and a resourceful twelve-year-old delivery boy named Benny Keagan and his dog Sparky.
Questions remain:
Is someone really trying to murder Gemma? She thinks so. Was Simon Croft shot because of something he discovered in the course of writing a book about the Second World War? Jury thinks so. And is the painting Marshall Trueblood carts around Tuscanydragging Plant with himreally an original Masaccio? Only Trueblood thinks so. The Blue Last is vintage Grimescrowded with eccentric characters and atmospheric, humorous, and hauntingly sad.