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The Barnes & Noble Review
It's been ages since Richard Jury has seen his old friend, Detective Chief Inspector Mickey Haggerty, and Jury is shocked to find Haggerty in the final stages of a rare cancer that is certain to take his life very soon. Haggerty knows his days are numbered. He's worried about his family. But there's something that's worrying Haggerty even more -- a case that he needs Jury's help to solve.

The case involves two skeletons found in the rubble of The Blue Last pub, and these are no ordinary bones. When forensic experts identify the remains as those of a young woman and infant girl most likely killed during World War II, Haggerty can't help but recall the night The Blue Last was destroyed in the Blitz, and the people who lost their lives there, too.

Indeed, a young woman and child were killed in that bombing, and Haggerty is convinced that the woman's skeleton is what's left of Alexandra Tynedale, daughter of brewing magnate Oliver Tynedale. The discovery of Alexandra's remains after all these years is surprising enough, but it's the child that really interests Haggerty. Because if he's right about the infant's identity, an impostor has perpetrated an outrageous lie on the Tynedale family -- an impostor who's in line to inherit the kind of fortune some people would kill for....

Now, as Richard Jury contemplates his friend's obsession with the Tynedale family and its heirs, the murder of London businessman Simon Croft brings him back once again to Haggerty's bizarre investigation. Was Croft, son of Oliver Tynedale's former business partner and beloved friend of the Tynedales, killed because of something he knew about the woman who claims to be Tynedale's granddaughter? Was the book he was working on about to tell all? Jury thinks so. But nothing can prepare him for the startling truth he is about to uncover -- or the ultimate betrayal that lies at the end of the road....

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The vagaries of memory, the legacy of war. The last thing in the world Richard Jury wants to think about is the war that killed his mother, his father, his childhood and made orphans of so many of the gaunt and sad-eyed children pictured in this handful of snapshots his old friend Mickey Haggerty shoves toward him on the desk." "Mickey Haggerty, a DCI with the City police, has asked for Jury's help. Two skeletons have been unearthed in the City during the excavation of London's last bomb site, where once stood a pub called the Blue Last. Mickey believes that a child who survived the bombing has been posing for more than fifty years as a child who didn't. The grandchild of brewery magnate Oliver Tynedale supposedly survived that December 1940 bombing...but did she?" "Mickey also has a murder to solve. Simon Croft, prosperous City broker and son of the one-time owner of the Blue Last, is found shot to death in his Thames-side house. But the book he was writing about London during the German blitzkrieg has disappeared." "Jury wants to get eyes and ears into Tynedale Lodge and looks to his friend Melrose Plant to play the role. Reluctantly, Plant plays it, accompanied on his rounds of the Lodge gardens by nine-year-old Gemma Trim, orphan and ward of Oliver Tynedale; and Benny Keegan, a resourceful twelve-year-old delivery boy." "We are all orphans," says Mickey. "Leftovers," says Gemma.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Reading Grimes's 16th Richard Jury novel (The Case Has Altered, etc.) is like watching a good movie on TV constantly interrupted by commercials. The author used to produce well-crafted, atmospheric works with delightful characters, but in recent years they've become unnecessarily long, overpopulated with minor characters (including Melrose), who take up a lot of time while contributing little to the crime at hand. The premise here is promising enough: the bodies of a woman and an infant turn up in the last unredeveloped bomb site in London (a pub called the Blue Last), victims of the final heavy German bombing of WWII. The woman, identified as Alexandra Tyndale, was the daughter of a wealthy brewing magnate; the infant was the daughter of Alexandra's nanny. Or was the infant, in fact, Alexandra's daughter, whom the nanny swapped with her own child to make her heir to the Tyndale fortune? It's all quite Victorian. Called in by his friend DCI Mickey Haggerty to help on the case, Richard Jury soon finds himself involved with a murder that could be related. Two children, Grimes's usual pathologically precocious tots, enter the action, as does Melrose with a whole subplot of his own. Because of this excess baggage, the reader must wait impatiently for the mystery to resume. A far-fetched solution will satisfy only the author's staunchest fans. 8-city author tour. (Sept. 10) Forecast: Despite the weakness of this title, Grimes is impervious to negative criticism; like others in the series, this one should hit bestseller charts. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

After a three-year hiatus, Grimes returns with her 17th Richard Jury mystery. Here, Jury's old friend Mickey Haggerty, a London cop, persuades him to investigate the murder of Simon Croft, perhaps killed because he was writing a book that would expose a 50-year-old deception, the substitution of the granddaughter of magnate Oliver Tynedale for the child of her nanny during the London blitz. When he goes to Tynedale Lodge, Jury finds a nine-year-old girl, Oliver's ward, who may also be a murder target but the evidence of miscreancy is inconclusive. There is an odd subplot that sends Jury's friends Melrose Plant and Marshall Trueblood to Italy in search of a painting's provenance, plus the usual assortment of eccentric characters and two winning children. The plot is as devious and convoluted as any Jury mystery, but readers who aren't Renaissance fans may find the side trip to Italy superfluous. For mystery and Jury aficionados. Francine Fialkoff, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews