Rainbow's End
by Martha Grimes
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Book Summary Information
Author: Martha GrimesEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-06-01
ISBN: 0345394267
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of Rainbow's End
Book Review: Really poor, and symptomatic of the whole series.
Summary: 1 Stars
Having read several of the Richard Jury novels years ago, I remembered why I stopped reading them when I started this one - chosen solely because I'm an English reader travelling to Santa Fe for the first time soon.
The chronological background of the book is ridiculous. It was written in the 1990's and is meant to be a contemporary setting, yet doesn't even remotely resemble the England I've lived in for the past 50 years. For example, there haven't been sweet shops such as the one she describes since the 1930's.
Richard Jury was supposedly a schoolboy during World War II, a fact made much of during the story. Even in the mid-1990's he'd be knocking on towards 60. The English part of the story is people with aristos and the gentility who mock the `ways' of the common folk, views which the reader seems to be expected to share. If it's meant as parody, it singularly fails to convince. If the book had been set in the 1920's the attitudes towards class of its characters might be more believable. Indeed, many of the 'characters' are merely ludicrous caricatures - e.g. the 'loveable'(read *very* sub-Dickensian, & wouldn't be out of place in a poor Dicken's knock-off 150 years ago) cockney-rogue family with a baby named Robespierre are deeply irritating, and their antics farcical. Perhaps the book - and this is true of the other Grimes crime I have read - is aiming for the surreal, but all it arouses in this reader is perplexity and irritation. Frankly, to portray England as like this in the 1990's is insulting. I don't read mysteries for the realism or the social analysis, I read to escape, but if the writer wants me to suspend disbelief she had better make a *bit* more of an effort not to get her setting so wildly incorrect.
The book also features two child-characters, one carried over from a previous book, both annoying rather than endearing or intriguing, which was apparently the intention.
I couldn't wait to finish it, and I mean that in the worst possible way.
Oh - the plot. The solution to the crime was obvious well before the end - and well before Richard Jury eventually tumbled to it - and it wasn't very original or clever, either, despite all the attempts at befuzzlement and mystification.
This book and series, though purportedly set in the UK, is certainly not meant for anyone who knows anything about us!
Summary of Rainbow's End
"Once again, Grimes hooks her readers with the engaging Jury and friends and with skillful tucking of hints into unexpected corners."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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 thirteen-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. And while his good friend Melrose Plant pursues inquiries in London, Jury delves deeper into the more baffling elements of the case, discovering firsthand what the guide books don't tell you: that the Land of Enchantment is also a landscape ripe with tragedy, treachery, and murder.
"RAINBOW'S END is itself a literary rainbow. It's the skillful blend of mystery and comedy and pathos, a Martha Grimes trademark, that makes this visit with Richard Jury and company so memorable and satisfying."
--Mostly Murder
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