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"Chew on this," says Melrose Plant to Richard Jury, who's in
the hospital being driven crazy by Hannibal, a nurse who
likes to speculate on his chances for survival. Jury could
use a good story, preferably one not ending with his own demise. 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. A woman has been found dead on the track-a woman who
was a stranger even to the Ryders. But not to Plant. She's the woman he saw in The Grave
Maurice. Together with Jury, Nell's family, and the
Cambridgeshire police, Plant embarks on a search to find
Nell and bring her home. But is there more to their mission
than just restoring a fifteen-year-old girl to her family? The Grave Maurice is the eighteenth entry in the Richard
Jury series and, from its pastoral opening to its calamitous
end, is full of the same suspense and humor that devoted
readers expect from Martha Grimes.
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