Martha Grimes: The Lamorna Wink (USA 2000)

From the Publisher:
Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury returns -- but not before sidekick Melrose Plant finds himself embroiled in haunting case of murder past and present

With his good friend Richard Jury on a fool's errand in Northern Ireland, Melrose Plant tries -- in vain -- to escape his aunt and his Long Piddleton lethargy by fleeing to Cornwall. There, high on a rocky promontory overlooking the sea, he rents a house -- one furnished with tragic memories. But his Cornwallian reveries are tempered by the local waiter/cab driver/amateur magician. The industrious Johnny Wells seems unflappable -- until his beloved aunt disappears. Now, Plant is dragged into the disturbing pasts of everyone involved -- and a murder mystery that only Richard Jury can solve...

Martha Grimes: The Lamorna Wink. Onyx Books, ISBN: 0451409361 (September, 2000), 420 p., $6.99.

Martha Grimes: The Lamorna Wink (UK 2000)

From the Publisher:
Five years ago in Cornwall, two children disappeared from their beds and were found mysteriously drowned. When a woman is murdered nearby, the police look for a connection between the deaths. Melrose Plant, renting the children's empty home is caught up in the inquiry, and soon Richard Jury arrives to investigate

Martha Grimes: The Lamorna Wink. Headline, ISBN: 074726841X (September, 2000), 435 p., £5.99.

Martha Grimes: The Lamorna Wink (UK 1999)

From the Publisher:
Five years ago in Cornwall, two children disappeared from their beds and were found mysteriously drowned. When a woman is murdered nearby, the police look for a connection between the deaths.

Martha Grimes: The Lamorna Wink. Headline, ISBN: 074727200X (December, 1999), 274 p., £16.99 (?).

Martha Grimes: The Lamorna Wink (USA 1999)

From the Publisher:
"Melrose was drawn by the rasp of the water and stood on the rocky promontory looking down at the sharp collapse of water spewing against stone. A stone stairway had been fashioned from the rocky cliff and led down to the sea. Light glimmered on the wet stone. Melrose stood there looking and feeling he was getting down to the bedrock of existence."

So says Melrose Plant as he sits gloomily in a tearoom in Cornwall, served by a remarkable young fellow named Johnny Wells -- waiter, cab driver, and amateur magician. The gloom (and the pot of poison) is all for Agatha, the aunt who has followed Melrose to Bletchley village, where he had planned to eseape his Long Piddleton lethargy by renting an old house high on a rocky promontory overlooking the sea.

Seabourne house looks like the set of a romantic film of the forties or fifties, but Melrose is unprepared for the onslaught of memories it triggers. And in examining his own past, he is caught up in the tragic past of the Bletchley family.

The village itself is dominated by a stately home turned hospice (providential for Detective Sergeant Alfred Wiggins), thanks to the billionaire Morris Bletchley, the American developer of a chain of fast food eateries and owner of Seabourne.

With Richard Jury sent on a fool's errand to Northern Ireland, Melrose turns to Brian Macalvie for help when Johnny's aunt, Chris Wells, disappears. Macalvie, a commander in the Devon and Cornwall police, is conducting his own investigation into the murder of a woman on a public footpath near the hamlet of Lamorna Cove. Macalvie and Melrose repair to Lamorna's single pub, The Wink, and here the intrepid and intense Brian Macalvie reveals a side of himself he'd just as soon had stayed buried up in Scotland.

Macalvie's past, Plant's past, and the tragic past of the Bletchleys converge at the end with Richard Jury, who comes to help set things to rights. The Lamorna Wink once again confirms Martha Grimes as "one of the masters of the genre" (Newsweek).

MARTHA GRIMES is the bestselling author of eighteen novels, fifteen of them Richard Jury mysteries, the most recent being The Stargazey and The Case Has Altered, a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Washington, D.C., and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Martha Grimes: The Lamorna Wink. A Richard Jury Mystery. Viking, ISBN: 0670888702 (October, 1999), 368 p., $22.95.