Martha Grimes Books in Order

Businessman Tom Treadnor is shot dead while sitting in a suburban London pub called The Queen, and everyone close to him seems oddly unreliable. As Jury investigates, a mysterious double of the victim and Sergeant Wiggins’s search for his missing sister complicate a case full of shifting identities.

After a French tourist’s body washes ashore on a Cornish island, two more baffling murders follow, one on a Midlands estate and one in Exeter Cathedral. Jury teams up with Brian Macalvie and legendary retired detective Tom Brownell to learn whether these killings are separate crimes or a single pattern.

A gunman kills an American couple outside the Artemis Club, then calmly commandeers a black cab and vanishes toward Heathrow. London taxi drivers, a fearless ten year old girl, and Richard Jury all join forces as the case leads from a hidden cabbies’ pub to gem smuggling and Kenya.

At a bar perched high above London, Tom Williamson asks Jury to re examine the long ago death of his wife, believed to have fallen down the stairs during a vertigo attack. Linked deaths of a child and a mysterious woman in red force Jury and Melrose Plant to revisit old tragedies.

In this sequel to Foul Matter, stalled novelist Cindy Sella is being hounded by a vengeful former agent who demands unearned commissions. Hitmen Candy and Karl are hired to remove the problem and instead design an elaborate, often comic campaign to drive him quietly out of his mind.

In this dual memoir, Martha Grimes and her son Ken alternate chapters to describe how alcohol shaped, and nearly wrecked, their lives. Writing in candid, plain language, they share setbacks, treatments, and small turning points on the long, uneven path toward lasting sobriety.

Emma Graham juggles waitressing, reporting, and recovering from an attack while several intertwined crimes still unsettle her hometown. With new visitors and a mysterious drifter arriving at Spirit Lake, she pushes deeper into the cold cases of murdered women and a baby who vanished from the Belle Rouen.

A young woman is shot behind a country pub known as the Black Cat, dressed in couture clothes that do not fit her quiet village life. As more escorts are killed, Jury works to reconcile her identities as shy librarian and high priced companion, guided only by a watchful cat.

Still haunted by her lost past, young drifter Andi Oliver lands in a North Dakota town dominated by an industrial hog farm. Going undercover at the facility, she witnesses brutal treatment of animals and draws dangerous attention from both the farm’s owners and a shadowy figure from her own history.

When charming bachelor Billy Maples is found murdered after a night at an exclusive club called Dust, Richard Jury must sort through the victim’s double life in the art world. With Melrose Plant installed at Henry James’s old house in Rye, secrets from Maples’s past begin to surface.

In a London wine bar, a stranger named Harry Johnson tells Jury an extraordinary story about a physicist whose wife, child, and dog vanished during a house hunting trip. Only the dog came back. As Jury checks the tale, reality and invention blur, and a body finally surfaces.

Now working as a cub reporter, twelve year old Emma Graham discovers the ruins of a burned luxury hotel hidden in the woods. The crumbling Belle Rouen may hold answers to a long ago kidnapping and the recent shooting that nearly killed her, if Emma can piece the stories together.

The shooting of an unidentified five year old girl on a shabby London street propels Jury into one of his bleakest cases, involving a child abuse ring, a financier with a poisonous past, and an earlier abduction tied to a grand house in Cornwall called Angel Gate.

When a bestselling thriller writer demands that his new publisher quietly drop a literary author, the house’s ruthless boss hires hitmen Candy and Karl to solve the problem. The killers, who have scruples and a love of books, drift through New York’s publishing world where contracts turn deadly.

Still recovering from a near fatal shooting, Jury is drawn into the case of Nell Ryder, a teenager who vanished from her family’s stud farm along with a prized horse. At the pub called The Grave Maurice, evidence of insurance fraud, stolen thoroughbreds, and a brutal hormone farm slowly comes into view.

At London’s last untouched bombsite, workers uncover the remains of a young mother and child from the Blitz, raising doubts about which infant really survived. As Richard Jury investigates, a modern City broker connected to the old pub called The Blue Last is shot dead, tying past and present together.

This volume pairs two novellas about solitary women whose lives change when they fall into unsettling relationships. One meets a famous travel writer over ritual lunches, the other an admired actor in a London tea shop, and both must face what they have sacrificed to loneliness.

Back at Hotel Paradise, Emma Graham is still obsessed with the old drowning of Mary Evelyn Devereau and a newer shooting in town. Roaming between a derelict mansion, the cafe, and the courthouse, she pieces together how past and present murders in La Porte are knotted together.

Melrose Plant rents a seaside house in Cornwall where two children once drowned on the stone steps. When their guardian disappears and another woman is found dead near the cove, Plant draws in Richard Jury and Brian Macalvie to uncover overlapping motives of revenge and exploitation.

A teenage girl wakes up in a remote bed and breakfast with no memory of who she is and a note saying her father figure will soon return. Fleeing into the New Mexico mountains, she meets Mary Dark Hope, and together they hunt the man who abducted her while rescuing abused animals.

On a bleak November night, Richard Jury notices a luminous blonde in a fur coat hopping on and off a bus outside the Stargazey pub, then vanishing through the gates of Fulham Palace. When a lookalike turns up murdered, Jury’s search leads into London’s art world and an old film star’s troubled family.

In the lonely Lincolnshire fens, two women linked to a remote estate are found dead, and the main suspect is Jenny Kennington, a woman Jury has never stopped caring about. To clear her name, he sends Melrose Plant in undercover as an antiques expert at Fengate.

Three women in England die of apparently natural causes, but the pattern bothers Richard Jury. The trail takes him to Santa Fe, where a guarded thirteen year old girl and her pet coyote hold pieces of a puzzle that stretches across continents.

Twelve year old Emma Graham lives in a once grand but now shabby resort hotel run by her mother and aunt. Fascinated by the decades old drowning of a girl her own age, Emma starts asking questions around the lake, stirring up long buried secrets in her small Maryland town.

When a bar patron is murdered in Baltimore, local police turn to Richard Jury for help. With Melrose Plant and Sergeant Wiggins in tow, Jury wades into a harbor full of eccentrics, following clues that circle back to a historic tavern called The Horse You Came In On.

In a faded lakeside town, waitress Maud Chadwick watches her grown son pull away from her while the local sheriff confides his fears about a string of murdered women. As their quiet friendship deepens, Maud becomes entangled in a case that threatens the fragile peace of the community.

After a brief, troubled affair, the widow Jane Holdsworth is found dead and Richard Jury himself is treated as a suspect. Confined to London, he sends Melrose Plant to the Lake District to pose as a librarian and pry into a family history strewn with unexplained deaths.

On a bleak holiday in Yorkshire, Richard Jury watches a woman calmly shoot her husband in the lounge of the Old Silent inn. Determined to understand why, he follows her silence into a tangle of past kidnappings, family money, and long deferred grief.

This book length mystery in verse follows a Scotland Yard inspector named Bygraves through a series of oddly staged deaths. Using the structure of a classic British whodunit, the poem plays with questions about guilt, justice, and the stories detectives tell themselves.

A dismembered corpse tumbles from a newly delivered antique desk in Long Piddleton, turning village gossip into horror. Jury’s search leads from a country estate to London’s riverside slums, where the dead man’s double life left a string of lovers and dangerous enemies.

When two women are strangled a year apart, one on a lonely Devon road and one outside a Mayfair pub named I Am the Only Running Footman, Richard Jury joins Brian Macalvie to hunt a clever killer who understands family secrets and fear.

In Ashdown Dean, a rash of suspicious pet deaths seems like small town gossip until violence strikes a young woman. Called in to assist, Jury and Melrose Plant follow the trail to a guarded teenager and a hidden refuge for mistreated animals.

Around bleak Dartmoor, three children have been killed, and fears rise that a predator is still at work. From the lonely pub Help the Poor Struggler to a moorland estate with an orphaned heiress, Jury and Brian Macalvie chase a crime rooted in old injustice.

During the theater season in Stratford upon Avon, a member of a tour group is found murdered near the pub called the Dirty Duck. Richard Jury must look past staged deaths and Shakespearean drama to find a killer hiding in plain sight.

Trapped by snow in the days before Christmas, Richard Jury meets a woman in a graveyard who is soon found dead. At a nearby country house, Melrose Plant discovers another body, and the remote Jerusalem Inn becomes the link between both chilling murders.

A severed finger found near the village of Littlebourne pulls Richard Jury into a case linking a baffling local murder, a London street attack, and a rumored treasure. Gossip in the pub called the Anodyne Necklace slowly reveals how the pieces fit.

A woman in theatrical costume is stabbed on a foggy Twelfth Night in a Yorkshire fishing village, and no one is sure who she really is. Richard Jury must untangle a family’s buried scandals to learn why someone wanted the impostor dead.

In the village of Long Piddleton, two strangers are murdered in spectacular fashion at neighboring pubs, one wedged into a beer cask and one swinging from a sign. Scotland Yard inspector Richard Jury and aristocrat Melrose Plant dig into the village’s well kept grudges.