Richard Jury is laid up in hospital, recovering from some serious wounds. Melrose Plant and Sargeant Wiggins have been frequent visitors. In an effort to give Jury something to occupy his mind, Wiggins gives him a copy of “The Daughter of Time” by Josephine Tey. Wiggins had been given the book by Plant when Wiggins was in hospital. The main character of the book is in a situation similar to Jury’s. The second plot to the book is the mystery concerning Richard the Third and the princes who were kept in the tower and mysteriously disappeared. Wiggins gesture is well meant, but Jury is not a mystery reader.

To distract Jury, Plant tells him of a conversation he overheard at the Grave Maurice, across the street from the hospital.

Plant sits to the bar and overhears two women talking. They were discussing about someone named Ryder and that he was a “poor sod” as his daughter had disappeared about two years ago. Then a comment was made about a brother and he’d been killed. Only bits and pieces, but it interests Plant. And it turns out Jury’s doctor is the “poor sod” and asks if Jury would look into the matter “unofficially.”

Jury is released from hospital with instructions to rest, but he immediately starts investigating. The case is stone cold, but little by little Jury gets bits and pieces, tying them together.

It turns out the girl’s disappearance isn’t the only mystery. There is the death of the doctor’s brother during a race in Paris and the mysterious goings on at a nearby stud farm. Somehow they seem related.

This is not a book to race through. The clues are not always obvious and neither are the connections. ( )

18th in the series and the first book that just felt too long at times to read. Plus the tragic ending was just one too many tragedies for me in my murder mysteries. After being shot at the end of the previous novel, Richard Jury finds himself in the hospital being ministered to by Dr. Roger Ryder whose daughter, Nell disappeared 2 years before. To keep himself busy while recuperating, Richard decides to look into the case with the able help of Melrose Plant who ends up buying himself a racehorse.

Entertaining, just not quite as compelling as her previous novels were to me. ( )

This is another Richard Jury novel whose title comes from the name of an English pub (as do all the Richard Jury titles). Jury is recuperating from gunshot wounds but his friend, Melrose Plant, knows just the thing to get him well, a mystery. Jury's surgeon had a daughter abducted 2 years previously and never heard from her again. I thought the solution was contrived and not very believable. Usually, the eccentric characters in this series make a book worth reading but even they seemed stretched thin. ( )

While I normally enjoy her books, this one was not really my cup of tea. Not up to her usual standards. ( )

Of all the living mystery writers, Martha Grimes has the most style. A lovely writing said the Chicago Tribune, and it is true. Her usual heroes, the unhappy detective Jury and his aristocratic friend Melrose are as fascinating as was Peter Wimsey in the old books of Dorothy Sawyers. Slightly but pleasantly old-fashioned. And this is the best of the 17 Jury novels she had published this far. I read them all. People who write a lot of thrillers, like Connelly, Sandford or Kellerman, tend to become gloomy with time. It is part of the job, and Grimes does not escape it. So, this is an excellent book that I recommend, but I will never read another one. I suddenly understood that Grimes was going to kill the only nice people she describes. No more gloom for me, give me young writer! ( )