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Product Description
After a luminous blonde leaves, reboards, then leaves the double-decker bus Richard Jury is on, he follows her to the gates of Fulham Palace...and goes no further. Days later, when he hears of the death in the palace's walled garden, Jury will wonder if he could have averted it. But is the victim the same woman Jury saw? As he and Melrose Plant follow the complex case from the Crippsian depths of London's East End to the headier heights of Mayfair's art scene, Jury will realize that in this captivating woman--dead or alive--he may have finally met his match...
Amazon.com Review
It all starts with two unlikely passengers on the same number 14 Fulham Road bus--Scotland Yard superintendent Richard Jury and a glamorous blonde woman in a sable coat. He can't keep his eyes off her, and when she disembarks, Jury follows her to the gates of Fulham Palace. He loses her in the fog, however, and when she's found shot to death in the herb garden of the palace, the game's afoot--especially since the victim may only look like Jury's blonde, but not be her at all. Two glamorous women in priceless fur coats in an obscure little museum in the London suburbs on the same foggy autumn night? Well, maybe. Or maybe not. The plot ultimately involves chicanery in the art world, a family of Russian émigrés, a missing Chagall, an international female assassin, a couple of unsettlingly strange young girls, and a hilarious send up of a stuffy English men's club. The tale serves a hearty helping of Grimes's usual interesting, not to say eccentric, characters. Among the most consistently fascinating of these is Jury's aristocratic friend Melrose Plant, a direct descendant of Lord Peter Wimsey and other wealthy, titled, amateur English detectives. Fans of Grimes's previous Superintendent Jury capers--each of which takes its name from an English pub--will enjoy the jokes, and new readers will appreciate the author's dry wit, her sharp eye for British oddities, and the way she turns an ordinary police procedural into a cozy little study of the national character. The Jury series began with The Man with a Load of Mischief (1981) and has included The Deer Leap (1985), The Horse You Came In On (1993), The Case Has Altered (1997), and several other tales. --Jane Adams
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