The Blue Last by Martha Grimes

Scotland Yard superintendent Richard Jury recruits a reluctant Melrose Plant to solve a case of bizarre coincidence--or shocking complicity....

Mickey Haggerty, a DCI with the City police, has asked for Richard Jury's help. Two skeletons have been unearthed during the excavation of London's last bomb site, where once stood a pub called the Blue Last. The grandchild of brewery magnate Oliver Tynedale supposedly survived that December 1940 bombing ... but did she? Then the son of the onetime owner of the Blue Last is found shot to death -- the book he was writing about London during the German blitzkrieg ... gone. A stolen life, a stolen book? Or is any of this what it seems? With Melrose Plant sent undercover, Jury calls into question identity, memory, and provenance in a case that resurrects his own hauntingly sad past... .

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