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Once again "the game's afoot" in the latest Martha Grimes novel, THE WINDS OF CHANGE. The regulars who comprise her ensemble cast are on hand as Richard Jury, Melrose Plant and Wiggins tackle multiple cases --- the tragedy of a little girl, shot in the head on a North London street; the disappearance of another child three years before in Cornwall; the murder of a woman who was shot with a .22-caliber gun, her body found on the grounds of an estate called "Angel Gate"; and the ongoing investigation of a pedophilia ring, thought to be working out of a house near where the dead little girl was found. Would any of these cases play a role in the other cases at hand, or are they merely coincidences? Jury, like most lawmen, doesn't believe in coincidences.
As if this was not enough to keep Jury and company busy, his only living blood relative, a cousin who lived in Newcastle, dies suddenly. While the two were not really "kissin' cousins," her death has a profound impact on him: "Death had a way of kicking out the props, of smashing one's carefully constructed defenses. It was fine for him to say he saw his cousin seldom and that he wasn't close to her and that, actually, they had never liked each other. That could work in life; it didn't work in death."
The themes of memory and identity are at the core of THE WINDS OF CHANGE. Why is it that too often things are not what they seem, and what we think we remember today has a slightly different caste tomorrow? Jury wrestles with these notions while his old friend, the crusty Commander Macalvie, who brings along the recently promoted DS Cody Platt to help with the investigations, joins him and Melrose Plant. They take over "The Winds of Change … a pub located in the village of South Petherwin." The questions about memories and identities are not far from Jury's consciousness as he listens to the outline of the now three-year-old disappearance of Flora Baumann and is also filled in on the death of the unknown woman whose body was found on Flora's stepfather's property.
Martha Grimes is a master of her genre and a writer of extraordinary power and imagination. In this, her nineteenth Richard Jury novel, she has produced a literary mystery that will delight lovers of the genre. Readers who enjoy a good tease about where a quote comes from, or what book a character has peeked out of, or allusions to writers and works, will find themselves immersed in literary trivia that will add new depth to the armchair sleuth's enjoyment. Quotes from Shakespeare and Robert Frost to Emily Dickinson's line, "Split the lark and you'll find the music" and Philip Larkin's words, "The trees are coming into leaf/ Like something almost being said", pepper the plot. Grimes repeatedly refers to Henry James's characters, books and style. She inserts and insinuates the names of characters, and shadows well-known plots from other classic writers. Even Brown's Hotel in London and Agatha Christie get the nod in this kaleidoscopic diorama of murder, mayhem and hugger-mugger crime.
The police procedural may never be the same after word gets out about how successful and fulfilling THE WINDS OF CHANGE is as a novel, a mystery, a whodunit, and a pastiche of literary hijinks. The timing of this book's release is also sage since it's far more than a summer fling. Enjoy!
--- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum
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