The Dirty Duck Author:Martha Grimes In this fourth ingenious adventure by the new star of mystery writers, Martha Grimes returns with her master of detection, Richard Jury, Detective Superintendent, Scotland Yard. Jury is shrewd, charming, kind, perceptive, and nearly unflappable -- except in the presence of bewitching eyes and precocious children. He needs all his wits and the ... more »help of his aristocratic unofficial aide Melrose Plant to track down a most complex murderer.
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, just behind the Church of the Holy Trinity, she is dead, her throat 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 Superintendent 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.
Martha Grimes's sharply observant eye for social comedy lets loose on this wry pairing of Shakespeare and unattractive Americans, each as perfectly cast as the frustrated Gwendolyn -- from a rich Southern coal miner to a computer fanatic from New Jersey. We are thus stylishly distracted while Jury decodes the slasher's poetic calling cards.
Yes, this sly and classic novel of detection continues the spirit of Christie, Allingham, Sayers and Marsh. But readers will relish as well the superb flair, irony and wit that Martha Grimes has made inimitably her own.« less