Long Piddleton had always been wary of newcomers. But the quiet town was stunned when the first stranger was found dead, upended in a butt of ale in the cellar of the Men with a Load of Mischief. Then the second body appeared, swinging in place of the mechanical man above the door of the Jack and Hammer. Suddenly Lord Piddleton had good reason to be wary of everyone! Its cozy pubs and inns with their polished pewter and blazing hearths had become scenes of the most bizarre crimes. Who were the victims? And who was the murderer? A stranger? A maniac? Or the disarmingly friendly man next door?

THE OLD FOX DECEIV'D

It is a chill and foggy Twelfth Night, wild with North Sea wind, when a bizarre murder disturbs the outward piece of Rackmoor, a tiny Yorkshire fishing village with a past that proves a tangled maze of unrequited loves, unrevenged wrongs, and even undiscovered murders. Inspector Jury finds no easy answers in his investigation - not even the identity of the victim, a beautiful young woman. Was she Gemma Temple, an impostor, or was she really Dillys March, Colonel Titus Crael's long-lost ward, returning after eight years to the Colonel's country seat and to a share of his fortune? And who was her murderer?

A spinster whose passion was bird watching, a dotty peer who pinched pennies, and a baffling murder made the tiny village of Littlebourne a most extraordinary place. And a severed finger made a ghastly clue in the killing that led local constables from a corpse to a boggy footpath to a beautiful lady's mansion. But Richard Jury refused preferring to take the less traveled route to a slightly disreputable pub, the Anodyne Necklace. There, drinks all around loosened enough tongues to link a London mugging with the Littlebourne murder and a treasure map that would chart the way to yet another chilling crime.

The Dirty Duck is a pub in Shakespeare's beloved Stratford, and in this pub Miss Gwendolyn Bracegirdle of Sarasota, Florida, fresh from a performance of As You Like It, takes her last drink. A few minutes later she is slashed ear to ear, the only clue: two lines from an unknown poem printed across a theater program. The razor-happy murderer, it seems is stalking a group of rich American tourists. And Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury, just passing through Stratford for a glimpse of the intriguing Lady Kennington, instead takes a crash course in the bloodier side of Elizabethan verse.

JERUSALEM INN

From the rough but colorful pub that provides the book's title, to the snowboard Gothic estate nearby, the chilly English landscape has never held more atmosphere - or thwarted romance. And Jury will never have a more mysterious Christmas. Five Days Before Christmas - On his way to a brief holiday (he thinks) Jury meets a woman he could fall in love with. He meets her in a snow covered graveyard-not, he thinks, the best way to begin an attachment. Four Days Before Christmas - Jury meets Father Rourke, who draws for him the semiotic square-"a structure that might simplify thought," says the priest, but Jury's thoughts need more than symbols. Three Days Before Christmas - Melrose Plant, Jury's aristocratic and unofficial assistant, arrives at Spinney Abbey, now home to a well-known critic. Among the assembled snowbound guests he meets: Lady Assington, Beatrice Sleight, and the painter Edward Parmenger. When they all assemble in the dining room, Lady Assington announces, "I think we should have a murder." Two Days Before Christmas - Jury meets Plant at Jerusalem Inn. What each would like to know is the other one doing there? One Day Before Christmas - Jury meets a murderer and metes out justice.

Around bleak Dartmoor, where the Hound of the Baskervilles once bayed, three children have been brutally murdered. Now Richard Jury of Scotland Yard joins forces with a hot-tempered local constable named Brian Macalvie to track down the killer. The trail begins at a desolate pub, Help the Poor Struggler. It leads straight to the estate of Lady Jessica, a ten-year-old orphaned heiress who lives with her mysterious uncle and ever-changing series of governesses. And as suspense spreads across the forbidding landscape, an old injustice returns to haunt Macalvie...with clues that link a murder in the distant past with a killing yet to come.

In Ashdown Dean, a little English village, animals are dying in a series of seemingly innocuous accidents. While the puzzling deaths of village pets may raise some idle gossip over a pint or two at the Deer Leap, the village pub, this hardly seems a case for Superintendent Jury of Scotland yard. Nor does it seem much of a challenge for the combined deductive powers of Jury and Melrose, the affable former Earl of Caverness. It is his mystery writing-writing, amethyst-eyed friend, Polly Praed, who drags Plant and Jury to Ashdown Dean. The impatient Polly, having yanked open a call box in the pouring rain, is ill prepared for what lands at her feet. The now-deadly case is cause for calling in Scotland Yard.

In a rainy ditch in a Devon wood, a hitchhiker is found dead. Almost a year later, on another rainy night, another murder; this time, however, the victim is found just outside a pub called I Am the Only Running Footman, near Berkeley Square in London's fashionable Mayfair District. Devon policeman Brian Macalvie is convinced that the two murders are connected. And thus, in his eighth case, Richard Jury is drawn into the so-called Porphyria killings. A particularly elusive pair of murders. From the streets of London to the village of Somers Abbas, Jury and Macalvie are joined by the stolid if hypochondriac Sergeant Wiggins and the reluctant Melrose Plant. They meet in another pub, the Mortal Man, and, amidst the clatter and cry of the Warboys family, they ponder a labyrinthine set of clues.

When a dismembered corpse is found in the compartments of an antique secretaire a abattant, Marshall Trueblood, recipient of the precious piece of furniture, is the first to protest: "I bought the desk, not the body, send it back." Who would want to kill Simon Lean, the greedy nephew of the wealthy Lady Summerston? Leave it to Superintendent Richard Jury of Scotland Yard to suggest a connection to the murder of brassy Limehouse lady named Sadie Driver, found dead near Wapping Old Stairs...if that stone-cold body on the slipway is really Sadie. Not even her brother, Tommy, on a visit from Gravesend, can swear to it.

THE OLD SILENT

In the tenth murderous case for Richard Jury, the New Scotland Yard superintendent witnesses a killing in a West Yorkshire inn called the Old Silent, while his highborn , amateur colleague, Melrose Plant wishes to he could perform one as he drives his impossible Aunt Agatha to the Old Swan in Harrogate. Caught up in a triple murder, Jury would go to any lengths to help Nell Healey, the lovely widow of one of the victims. But Nell Healey remains silent as the Yorkshire moors, quiet as the grave, while the scope of the mystery widens.

Following a passionate and troubled love affair with a pretty widow named Jane Holdsworth, Jury finds himself, unaccountably, a suspect in a murder investigation. Detained in London, Jury sends his friend Melrose Plant, former Earl of Caverness, to the Holdsworth family's Lake District home to pose as an eccentric librarian. Plant discovers that his catalogue cards contain less data on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey than they do on tantalizing questions about the Holdsworths: What happened to Crabbe Holdsworth's first wife? What happened to his son, Graham? What happened to the cook Annie? And what might happen to the two children, favorites of rich old Adam Holdworth, who prefers the ambience of a swank retirement home, Castle Howe, where he and the elegant Lady Cray can drive the staff crazy? Jury and Sergeant Wiggins finally join Melrose at the Old Contemptibles pub, where they arrive at a solution that Jury detests, for no matter what he does, innocence will suffer.

The murder is in America, but the call goes out to Scotland Yard superintendent Richard Jury. Accompanied by his aristocratic friend Melrose Plant and by Sergeant Wiggins, Jury arrives in Baltimore, Maryland, home of zealous Orioles fans, mouth-watering crabs, and Edgar Allen Poe. In his efforts to solve the case, Jury rubs elbows with a delicious and suspicious cast of characters, embarking on a trail that leads to a unique tavern called "The Horse You Came In On"...

When three women die of "natural causes" in London and the West Country, there appears to be no connection-or reason to suspect foul play. But Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury has other ideas, and before long he's following his keen police instincts all the way to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There, in the company of a brooding thirteen-year-old girl and her pet coyote, he mingles with an odd assortment of characters and tangles with a twisted plot that stretches from England to the American Southwest. And while his good friend Melrose Plant pursues inquires in London, Jury delves deeper into the more baffling elements of the case, discovering firsthand what the guidebooks don't tell you; that the Land of Enchantment is also a landscape ripe with tragedy, treachery, and murder.

THE CASE HAS ALTERED

The sun, smoking behind a haze of cloud, threw off a light of burnished pewter. Mysteriously lit, it was as if the watery, colorless land refused drabness, stood determinedly against diminishment. This is a landscape that can easily deceive, the fens, a landscape that volunteers nothing, as if to say, a landscape that volunteers nothing, as to say, You're on your own, mate--much like the habitues of the only pub for miles around called The Case Has Altered. The Lincolnshire fens are the right setting for Richard Jury's latest case, a mystifying double murder. The body of one woman is found on the wash; another woman lies floating in a canal in Windy Fen. Both women are connected with Fengate: Dorcas Reese, a servant; Verna Dunn, the louche ex-wife of the owner, Max Owen, a man with a passion for antiques. So when the principal suspect turns out to be Jenny Kennington, a woman Jury has long loved, he decides he needs someone inside Fengate, someone who can impersonate an antiques expert...

Saturday night. It was not a night to be spending alone, riding a bus. When he was a teenager at the comprehensive, Saturday night without a girl, without a date, without at least your mates to raise hell with, Saturday night alone would have been shameful. One wouldn't want to be seen alone on a Saturday night.... Who are you kidding? That was never your life, Jury, not yours.

The girl's hair was white below the scarf, now a scarf of snow, and there was a fine rime of ice on her eyebrows. Her mouth was so numb she couldn't have spoken even if there had been someone to speak to. She wore the snowshoes she had found back in the cabin and had brought the supplies, painkiller and bandages, whatever she might need to dress a wound. She wondered if trappers wore snowshoes. Probably not. Anyway, a trapper wouldn't put himself through the unpleasantness of coming out in a heavy snow like this to check his traps. In New Mexico, the law was you had to check the traps every thirty-six hours, but who paid any attention? An animal trapped stayed trapped.

While Richard Jury has been sent on a dead end chase by Chief Superintendent Racer, Melrose Plants heads for Cornwall to take up temporary residence in an old Cornish manor. Unfortunately, Lady Ardry boards BritRail and follows him to Bletchley House, which sits high on a rocky promontory overlooking the sea like the set of a romantic old film. Bletchley Village is dominated by a stately home turned Hospice, thanks to the billionaire, Morris Bletchley, the American owner of a chain of fast food eateries. He is also the grandfather of two small children who died mysteriously at Bletchley House years before. While having tea in the Woodbine Tea Room with Agatha, Plant is served by Johnny Wells, a young lad who manages a smile despite the disappearance of his beloved aunt, Chris. Seduced by the whole notion of the disappearance of aunts, Melrose calls Brian Macalvie, Commander of the Devon and Cornwall police, to find Macalvie is in the near-by Hamlet of Lamorna Cove, where the body of a woman is found in the surrounding Bluebell Wood. Macalvie and Plant repair to Lamorna's only pub, The Wink, but have barely sampled the local ale before another murder occurs, this one at the hospice. Macalvie's past, Plant's past, and the tragic past of the Bletchleys, converge at the end with Richard Jury, who comes to set things right.

In THE BLUE LAST, Jury finally faces the last thing in the world he wants to deal with - the war that killed his mother, his father, his childhood. Mickey Haggerty, a DCI with the London City police, has asked for Jury's help. Two skeletons have been unearthed in the City during the excavation of London's last bombsite, where once a pub stood called the The Blue Last. Mickey believes that a child who survived the bombing has been posing for over fifty years as a child who didn't. The grandchild of brewery magnet Oliver Tyndale supposedly survived that December 1940 bombing . . . but did she? Mickey also has a murder to solve. Simon Croft, prosperous City financial 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 Keagan, a resourceful twelve-year-old orphaned delivery boy. And Richard Jury may not make it out alive.

"Chew on this," says Melrose Plant to Richard Jury, who's in the hospital being driven crazy by Hannibal, a nurse who likes to speculate on his chances for survival. Jury could use a good story, preferably one not ending with his own demise. Plant tells Jury of something he overheard in The Grave Maurice, a pub near the hospital. A woman told an intriguing story about a girl named Nell Ryder, granddaughter to the owner of the Ryder Stud Farm in Cambridgeshire, who went missing more than a year before and has never been found. What is especially interesting to Plant is that Nell is also the daughter of Jury's surgeon. But Nell's disappearance isn't the only mystery at the Ryder farm. A woman has been found dead on the track-a woman who was a stranger even to the Ryders. But not to Plant. She's the woman he saw in The Grave Maurice. Together with Jury, Nell's family, and the Cambridgeshire police, Plant embarks on a search to find Nell and bring her home. But is there more to their mission than just restoring a fifteen-year-old girl to her family?

Two years ago, the first grisly murder - a woman raped and then mutilated. One year ago, the second. Both women were less than model mothers, both had problems with men, both murders showed the same MO. But the killer is in jail now, and the cases are closed. Except that the wrong man is behind bars. . . .

HOTEL PARADISE

A once fashionable, now fading resort hotel; a spinster aunt living in the attic; dirt roads that lead to dead ends; pettiness and cruelty in small-town America; a 12-year-old girl with a passion for double-chocolate ice cream sodas and an obsession with the death by drowning of another young girl 40 year before. It is a death that, like all shocking events in the past, has repercussions in the present - deadly repercussions.

THE TRAIN NOW DEPARTING: TWO NOVELLAS

Two thematically linked novellas each center on a single woman living a quiet, well-ordered, seemingly contented life. But each harbors a man who imperceptibly embroils its heroine in something far darker. Passionately told in Grimes's inimitable voice, her newest work brims with the singular characters and richly textured prose readers expect from this bestselling storyteller.

COLD FLAT JUNCTION

In Cold Flat Junction, the irrepressible and intuitive Emma is still obsessed with the "accidental" drowning of an adolescent girl, forty years ago. She seeks to unravel the mystery of the drowning and the unsolved murders that wind back to it. Extraordinary range and depth, singular characters, and intricate suspense make this yet another book that only the magnificent Martha Grimes could have written.