The Blue Last

The City, London's famous "square mile" and home to merchant bankers and brokers, maintains its own police force. Chief Inspector Michael Haggerty asks his old friend Richard Jury to prove that brewing magnate Oliver Tynedale's granddaughter is an imposter. Excavation of the site of the 'Blue Last', a London pub bombed in the Blitz, has turned up two skeletons - was the child found Tynedale's real granddaughter? Jury insists that Mickey is a better detective, but Mickey thinks he will soon be dead: he has incurable cancer.

Mickey also has to solve the murder of Simon Croft, merchant banker and son of late Oliver Tynedale's late business partner, a one-time owner of the 'Blue Last'. The nanny who purportedly saved the Tynedale baby's life still lives at Tynedale Lodge, and Jury asks a reluctant Melrose Plant to gather information in the guise of under gardener. Plant is accompanied by the irrepressible six-year-old Gemma Trimm, and a resourceful twelve-year-old delivery boy named Benny Keagan.

But questions remain: Is someone really trying to murder Gemma? She thinks so. Was Simon Croft shot because of something he discovered while writing a book about the Second World War? Jury thinks so. And is this painting Marshall Trueblood carts around Tuscany - dragging Plant with him - really an original Masaccio? Only Trueblood thinks so.

'The Blue Last' is vintage Grimes - crowded with eccentric characters, atmospheric, humorous, and hauntingly sad.