Vertigo 42

April 21, 2014
MWA Grandmaster Grimes pays tribute to Hitchcock in her middling 23rd mystery featuring London policeman Richard Jury (after 2010’s The Black Cat). Seventeen years after the discovery of heiress Tess Williamson’s body at the bottom of the terrace stairs at her Devon home, Tom Williamson still doesn’t believe that his wife’s death was accidental—and neither does Supt. Richard Jury, who suspects a link between Tess’s death and that of Hilda Palmer. Five years earlier, nine-year-old Hilda suffered a fatal fall into a drained swimming pool during a birthday party that Tess was hosting for a half dozen young friends. Meanwhile, Jury visits eccentric pal Melrose Plant in Northamptonshire, where he becomes sidetracked by a lost Staffordshire terrier and soon after by a fresh corpse. The plot lines eventually connect to a complex conundrum involving friendship, love, and betrayal. Readers who persevere past Jury’s confusing initial stay at the madcap Plant manse will be rewarded with an involving puzzle—right up to the frustratingly farfetched finale.

Starred review from May 15, 2014
Grimes, recipient of the Grand Master Award of the Mystery Writers of America in 2012, shows what mastery is all about in this compelling new Richard Jury mystery. To begin with, Grimes is superlative at describing the physical world; the view, for example, from the champagne bar called Vertigo 42 on the forty-second story of a London skyscraper lets Grimes give the reader both an overview of the Thames and its history in a few evocative sentences. And, when Grimes takes us into interiors, whether it's a posh country home or a down-at-the-heels flat, she is like Dickens in linking human character to habitat. Vertigo 42, as a setting, is a deliberate reminder (developed throughout the book) of Hitchcock's film. It also is a reminder to the widower who summons New Scotland Yard Superintendent Jury to the bar that the man's wife, who suffered from vertigo, died 17 years ago in a staircase fall that the inquest ruled an accident. The widower, Tom Williamson, is haunted by his wife's death, which he is convinced was murder, and asks Jury to reinvestigate. Williamson is convinced that his wife's death is linked to that of a child who drowned in their pool five years earlier. Two other murders occupy Jury as he confronts the puzzle of the past, and Grimes ingeniously links all of them to Hitchcock. One of the highlights in a stellar series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)