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.

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.

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 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.

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 13-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.

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....

In The Blue Last, Richard 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 50 years as a child who didn't.

"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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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 10-year-old orphaned heiress who lives with her mysterious uncle and ever-changing series of governesses.

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....

It is a chill and foggy 12th Night, wild with North Sea wind, when a bizarre murder disturbs the outward peace 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?