The latest in New York Times bestselling author Martha Grimes’s Richard Jury mystery series.
"The dog came back."
"This is a joke, right?"
"No, it isn’t. . . . So do you want to hear the rest of it?" Dumbly, Jury nodded.
The rest of it is told by Harry Johnson, a stranger who sits down next to Richard Jury as he’s drinking in a London pub called the Old Wine Shades. Over three successive nights Harry spins this complicated story about a good friend of his whose wife and son (and dog) disappeared one day as they were viewing property in Surrey. They’ve been missing for nine months—no trace, no clue, no lead as to what happened.
He’s a fascinating bloke, this Harry Johnson—rich, handsome, unattached, and brainy about the esoteric subject of quantum mechanics, a field in which the vanished woman’s husband, Hugh Gault, excels: He’s an authority on string theory, which has some pretty funny notions about the nature of reality.
Jury wonders, Is Harry Johnson winding him up? Or did it really happen? The dog did come back—but how? And from where? And when Jury investigates, all seems to be just as Harry described it.
This may be one of those books better read than listened to. It moves so slowly that it was at times hard to follow the plot and the characters.
Old Wine Shades
Written by Anonymous on August 25th, 2006
Book Rating: 2/5
For this hardcore Martha Grimes adict, this was a disappointing audiobook. I found it very slow, and the reading at times made is hard to know which character was speaking. In addition, inserting the dog's thoughts and intentions into the narrative just took it out of the acceptable for me. Difficult to believe Ms. Grimes would stoop this low.
And the ending? Totally unacceptable. Pass this one up and hope for a better one next time.
