The Knowledge: A Richard Jury Mystery -- Martha Grimes

With their signature wit, sly plotting, and gloriously offbeat characters, Martha Grimes's <i>New York Times</i> bestselling Richard Jury mysteries are "utterly unlike anyone else's detective novels" (<i>Washington Post</i>). In the latest series outing, <i>The Knowledge</i>, the Scotland Yard detective nearly meets his match in a Baker Street Irregulars-like gang of kids and a homicide case that reaches into east Africa.<p> Robbie Parsons is one of London's finest, a black cab driver who knows every street, every theater, every landmark in the city by heart. In his backseat is a man with a gun in his hand--a man who brazenly committed a crime in front of the Artemis Club, a rarefied art gallery-cum-casino, then jumped in and ordered Parsons to drive. As the criminal eventually escapes to Nairobi, Detective Superintendent Richard Jury comes across the case in the Saturday paper.<p> Two days previously, Jury had met and instantly connected with one of the victims of the crime, a professor of astrophysics at Columbia and an expert gambler. Feeling personally affronted, Jury soon enlists Melrose Plant, Marshall Trueblood, and his whole gang of merry characters to contend with a case that takes unexpected turns into Tanzanian gem mines, a closed casino in Reno, Nevada, and a pub that only London's black cabbies, those who have "the knowledge," can find. <i>The Knowledge</i> is prime fare from "one of the most fascinating mystery writers today" (<i>Houston Chronicle</i>).<br><br>