The Knowledge: A Richard Jury Mystery (Richard Jury Mystery, 24) - Softcover

Grimes, Martha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802129250 ISBN 13: 9780802129253

Publisher: Grove Press, 2019

Synopsis

With their signature wit, sly plotting, and gloriously offbeat characters, Martha Grimes’s New York Times bestselling Richard Jury mysteries are “utterly unlike anyone else’s detective novels” (Washington Post). In the latest series outing, The Knowledge, the Scotland Yard detective nearly meets his match in a Baker Street Irregulars-like gang of kids and a homicide case that reaches into east Africa.

Robbie Parsons is one of London’s finest, a black cab driver who knows every street, every theater, every landmark in the city by heart. In his backseat is a man with a gun in his hand―a man who brazenly committed a crime in front of the Artemis Club, a rarefied art gallery-cum-casino, then jumped in and ordered Parsons to drive. As the criminal eventually escapes to Nairobi, Detective Superintendent Richard Jury comes across the case in the Saturday paper.

Two days previously, Jury had met and instantly connected with one of the victims of the crime, a professor of astrophysics at Columbia and an expert gambler. Feeling personally affronted, Jury soon enlists Melrose Plant, Marshall Trueblood, and his whole gang of merry characters to contend with a case that takes unexpected turns into Tanzanian gem mines, a closed casino in Reno, Nevada, and a pub that only London’s black cabbies, those who have “the knowledge,” can find. The Knowledge is prime fare from “one of the most fascinating mystery writers today” (Houston Chronicle).

About this title

About the Author

Martha Grimes is the bestselling author of more than thirty books, twenty-four of them featuring Richard Jury. The recipient of the 2012 Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award, Grimes lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

He was a dead man and he knew it.

As soon as he ceased to be of any use to this bastard, the guy would shoot him.

So Robbie Parsons had to keep on being of use.

He was glad he’d earned his medallion; he was grateful for all of those months of routing and re-routing himself around London that had qualified him to drive a black cab.

Robbie had maps in his mind. He would entertain himself, while cruising around looking for a fare, by setting destinations involving landmarks he would either have to pass or not pass in the course of getting to a certain location. Maps in his mind, so no matter where this black guy told him to go (and he’d told him nothing thus far), Robbie knew how to take the longest way round without raising suspicions. The guy behind him wasn’t a Londoner, but then most Londoners didn’t know sod-all about London, anyway.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0802129250
• ISBN 13: 9780802129253
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368