The Winds of Change
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: 2005-11-01
ISBN: 0451216962
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Signet
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780451216960
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Winds of Change
Book Review: JOINING THE PARTY
Summary: 4 Stars
This recent Inspector Jury novel by Martha Grimes will have readers in two categories, those who know the series already and newcomers to it like myself. I find that I take to the style, and I suppose the best commendation I can offer is that this story has interested me enough to go back to the start of the series and get to know Jury and his associates. The author does not do much to introduce them to first-time readers by this stage of the game, the cast of new characters is quite large and I was constantly having to flip back a few pages to remind myself who was who, and Grimes shows awareness of this matter on p217 with a quiet and wryly humorous reference to the 87th Precinct series in which readers are likely to experience the same problem.
Ms Grimes is apparently American, and her command of the idiom of British crime-writing is impressive. Slip-ups are few and minor. In Britain we write `ploughed' and not `plowed', we do not refer to a cell-phone but to a mobile, and it should hardly even have needed a glance at a map to tell one of her characters that Kirkcudbright (so spelt) is unsurprisingly in Kirkcudbrightshire and not in Dumfriesshire. The style of crime novels and TV detective series in Britain has come on a bit since the palmy days of Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey. I could not imagine Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and the rest of them going anywhere near the topic of paederasty that features strongly in The Winds of Change - even Chandler would never have touched such a theme - but I recall it from the TV series A Touch of Frost. Detective inspectors with cultivated tastes are also now familiar from Inspector Morse, Jury and his friends give a good deal of prominence to Henry James, and I will be surprised if both of these series have not influenced Ms Grimes to some extent. Influences are perfectly legitimate and to be expected, but Grimes has the first quality that I look for in any novelist, namely a distinctive tone of her own. This is rather understated, in what is sometimes thought to be a particularly British way. Two people are found murdered near the beginning of this story, but the scenes are described with detachment. Indeed even the more sordid aspects to the narrative are treated with that, and this way of doing it is definitely to my own liking.
There is not a lot of `action' in the ordinary sense (shooting and whatnot) until near the end. The main focus is on the detectives as people, and they spend most of their time talking, and not talking exclusively about their investigations. The actual plot-line is not, I must say, my idea of the strongest I ever came across. It depends heavily on not one case but two of mistaken or unperceived identity which seemed to me approximately as convincing as those in Cosi Fan Tutte or Twelfth Night. However I finished the book with a reasonably strong idea of the more important identities of Jury, Cody and the others who are presumably delineated clearly for beginners in the earlier novels. To that extent, Ms Grimes has got herself one genuinely interested new reader who is likely to pursue his new interest, and I don't suppose I can say fairer than that.
Summary of The Winds of Change
Richard Jury embarks on the darkest investigation of his career when the dead body of a young London girl leads to the cold case of a missing girl in Launceston-an unsolved mystery that has haunted Police Officer Brian Macalvie for years.
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