Martha Grimes. The Blue Last (2001)

     Martha Grimes. The Blue Last (2001) Jury’s friend DCI Mike Haggerty asks him to find out whether a girl, supposedly saved from the bomb that destroyed The Blue Last and killed her mother, is who the nanny claimed she was, or perhaps actually the nanny’s daughter. Mike’s suspicion that she was an interloper is correct. The mother had a child before her marriage, which she gave up for adoption: the child’s identity is the knot whose unravelling unties all the other knots.
     Along the way Jury uncovers an art fraud, meets a streetwise urchin (with dog) who survives on his own, and makes friends with a number of other odd characters. Grimes lets herself go in this book: she’s really more interested in the characters than the plot, which however is well done and only mildly facile in it solution. **½ (2008)