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A Richard Jury Mystery
Over three nights Harry Johnson, a stranger who sits down next to Richard Jury as he's drinking in a London pub called the Old Wine Shades, spins a complicated story about a good friend of his whose wife and son (and dog) disappeared one day as they were viewing property in Surrey. They've been missing for nine months—no trace, no clue, no lead as to what happened.
He's a fascinating bloke, this Harry Johnson—rich, handsome, unattached, and brainy about the esoteric subject of quantum mechanics, a field in which the vanished woman's husband, Hugh Gault, excels: He’s an authority on string theory, which has some pretty funny notions about the nature of reality.
Jury wonders, Is Harry Johnson winding him up? Or did it really happen? The dog did come back—but how? And from where? And when Jury investigates, all seems to be just as Harry described it.
"... Grimes doesn't let these colorful cronies run away with the narrative, which delivers on its mysterious premise while celebrating the power of storytelling." - New York Times.
"Jury fans will not be disappointed." - Publishers Weekly.
"Even fans who can't appreciate the passing strangeness of this truly special adventure will be won over by a precocious little girl and a dog of rare intelligence." - Kirkus Reviews.
This information about The Old Wine Shades was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
The Man with a Load of Mischief was published in 1981, and from there Martha Grimes has published a book (sometimes two) every year for the past 25 years.
By her fourth and fifth books, Grimes received major review attention that not only lauded her ability as an American to write authentic British mysteries, but also to merge the conceits of the British form with the tone and atmosphere of the American. In 1987 The Five Bells & Bladebone was her "breakthrough" book, landing on the New York Times bestseller list. Her next two books, The Old Silent and The Old Contemptibles, were also New York Times bestsellers in both hardcover and paperback.
In 1992, with the publication of The End of the Pier, Grimes departed from her beloved cast of characters in the Richard Jury series to write a ...
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I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now only that place where the books are ...
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