The Blue Last

The City, London's famous square mile, is home to merchant bankers and brokers and maintains its own police force. Chief Inspector Michael Haggerty asks his old friend Richard Jury to do him a favor: prove that the granddaughter of the brewing magnate Oliver Tynedale is an impostor and that the real granddaughter was killed, along with her mother, in the London blitz when a bomb hit a pub called the Blue Last. The pub's location was the last bomb site in London and only recently bought by a developer. Excavation turns up two skeletons -- those of a young woman and a very young child.I don't get it, Mickey; you're a better cop than I am.Maybe. But I'll be dead.Mickey has incurable cancer.Mickey also has a murder to solve in the City: Simon Croft, a merchant banker and the son of the late Francis Croft, Oliver Tynedale's business partner and one-time owner of the Blue Last.To get eyes and ears inside Tynedale Lodge, where the nanny who purportedly saved the baby's life still lives, Jury asks Melrose Plant to take on the job and the guise of undergardener. I don't do floors, I don't do flowers, I don't know the difference between a hog and a hedgerow. He does it, of course, and is accompanied on his rounds by the irrepressible six-year-old Gemma Trimm and a resourceful twelve-year-old delivery boy named Benny Keagan and his dog Sparky.Questions remain: Is someone really trying to murder Gemma? She thinks so. Was Simon Croft shot because of something he discovered in the course of writing a book about the Second World War? Jury thinks so. And is the painting Marshall Trueblood carts around Tuscany -- dragging Plant with him -- really an original Masaccio? OnlyTrueblood thinks so. The Blue last is vintage Grimes -- crowded with eccentric characters and atmospheric, humorous, and hauntingly sad.