"Chew on this," says Melrose Plant to Richard Jury. 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.

Detective Richard Jury is back in the 16th novel in Martha Grimes' extraordinary New York Times best-selling series - now enmeshed in a series of strange crimes and disappearances and an age-old tragedy that consumes his sidekick, Melrose Plant....

As he leans over the body of an unidentified five-year-old girl shot in the back on a shabby London street, Superintendent Richard Jury knows he'll be facing one of the saddest investigations of his life. His colleague DI Johnny Blakeley, head of the pedophile unit of NSY, thinks he knows where this child came from - an iniquitous house on that same street, owned by well-known financier Viktor Baumann and fronted by a woman named Murchison. Blakeley has been trying to wreck their operation for a long time.

"The dog came back." "This is a joke, right?" "No, it isn't.... So do you want to hear the rest of it?" Dumbly, Jury nodded. The rest of it is told by Harry Johnson, a stranger who sits down next to Richard Jury as he's drinking in a London pub called the Old Wine Shades. Over three successive nights Harry spins this complicated story about a good friend of his whose wife and son (and dog) disappeared one day as they were viewing property in Surrey.

When the body of a French woman washes up on a wild inlet off the Cornish coast, Brian Macalvie, the divisional commander with the Devon-Cornwall police, is called in. Who could have killed this beautiful tourist when the only visible footprints nearby belong to the two little girls who found her? While Macalvie stands stumped in the Scilly Islands, inspector Richard Jury - 20 miles away on Land’s End - is at the Old Success pub, sharing a drink with the legendary former CID detective Tom Brownell, a man renowned for solving every case he undertook - well, nearly every case....

The once-charismatic Billy Maples was last seen in a club named Dust, before his murder in a trendy London hotel. Proving as inscrutable - and challenging - to Jury as the case is the beautiful chief inspecting officer. Before his death, Maples was a patron of London's finest art galleries and caretaker of author Henry James' house in Rye. It's there where Jury installs Melrose Plant, who takes his job to heart, as Jury closes in on the dark secrets behind Maples' friends and family.

Three months have passed since Richard Jury was left bereft and guilt- ridden after his lover's tragic auto accident, and he is now more wary than ever. He is deeply suspicious when requested on a case far out of his jurisdiction in an outlying village, where a young woman has been murdered behind the local pub. The only witness is the establishment's black cat, who gives neither crook nor clue as to the girl's identity or her killer's.

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 dimishment. This is a landscape that can easily deceive, a landscape that volunteers nothing, as if to say, You’re on your own, mate - much like the habitués of the only pub for miles around called The Case Has Altered.

Richard Jury is meeting Tom Williamson at Vertigo 42, a bar on the 42nd floor of an office building in London’s financial district. Despite inconclusive evidence, Tom is convinced his wife, Tess, was murdered 17 years ago. The inspector in charge of the case was sure Tess’ death was accidental - a direct result of vertigo - but the official police inquiry is still an open verdict and Jury agrees to re-examine the case.

Robbie Parsons is one of London's finest, a black cab driver who knows the city by heart. In his backseat is a man with a gun in his hand - a man who brazenly committed a crime in front of the Artemis Club then jumped in and ordered Parsons to drive. As the criminal eventually escapes to Nairobi, Detective Superintendent Richard Jury comes across the case. He knew one of the victims, a professor of astrophysics and an expert gambler. Feeling personally affronted, Jury enlists his whole gang of merry characters to contend with a case that involves Tanzanian gem mines, a closed Reno casino, and a hidden pub.

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?

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.

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.

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.

From the rough but colorful pub that provides the novel'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.