The Lamorna Wink (A Richard Jury Mystery)

While Richard Jury has been sent on a dead end chase by Chief Superintendent Racer, Melrose Plants heads for Cornwall to take up temporary residence in an old Cornish manor. Unfortunately, Lady Ardry boards BritRail and follows him to Bletchley House, which sits high on a rocky promontory overlooking the sea like the set of a romantic old film.

Bletchley Village is dominated by a stately home turned Hospice, thanks to the billionaire, Morris Bletchley, the American owner of a chain of fast food eateries. He is also the grandfather of two small children who died mysteriously at Bletchley House years before.

While having tea in the Woodbine Tea Room with Agatha, Plant is served by Johnny Wells, a young lad who manages a smile despite the disappearance of his beloved aunt, Chris. Seduced by the whole notion of the disappearance of aunts, Melrose calls Brian Macalvie, Commander of the Devon and Cornwall police, to find Macalvie is in the near-by Hamlet of Lamorna Cove, where the body of a woman is found in the surrounding Bluebell Wood. Macalvie and Plant repair to Lamorna's only pub, The Wink, but have barely sampled the local ale before another murder occurs, this one at the hospice.

Macalvie's past, Plant's past, and the tragic past of the Bletchleys, converge at the end with Richard Jury, who comes to set things right.

"One of the finest voices of our time. Martha Grimes is poetry." --Patricia Cornwell

"One of the established masters of the genre." --Newsweek

"Grimes nimbly orchestrates the suspense, giving the reader a sense of impending disaster."--The New York Times
Amazon.com Review
Fans of Martha Grimes will know that the Lamorna Wink must be a British pub, and one to which Superintendent Richard Jury or his aristocratic sidekick Melrose Plant can be counted on to repair in the process of solving a mystery or two. This time, with Jury off in Ireland, Plant takes the starring role. His vacation in picturesque Bletchley on the Cornwall coast is very nearly ruined by the coincidental appearance of his dreaded Aunt Agatha. Ironically, however, he is drawn to the plight of a young man, Johnny Wells, whose favorite aunt has disappeared suddenly without trace. In spite of Agatha, Plant decides to lease a house owned by an American millionaire whose two grandchildren died tragically on the beach a few years before. Within a day or so, a new dead body is found in neighboring Lamorna: that of Sada Colthorp, a young woman who had lived in the area but left to dabble in porn movies. Plant and divisional police commander Brian Macalvie (Help the Poor Struggler) believes there's a link between Colthorp and the missing Chris Wells. When the pieces start to come together (and a fast string of violence ensues), Jury makes a token appearance to tie up the remaining loose ends. But the day really belongs to Plant, who is becoming much more than an accidental detective, and to Macalvie, a character with an appeal that may eclipse even Jury's.

As always, Grimes provides comic relief at the expense of a tight plot by checking in with the myriad other characters who populate Plant's Long Piddleton and Jury's London. The impatient reader may wonder when, if ever, Plant and friends will cease their juvenile heckling of Vivian Rivington's Italian count. The final explanation of the children's deaths, however, will leave the most stoic mystery fan feeling distinctly queasy. That Grimes can so effectively amuse, shock, intrigue, and even irritate after 16 books bodes well for the continuing life of the series. --Barrie Trinkle