Customer Reviews

Rainbow's End

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This mystery, another in the installment of books featuring Inspector Richard Jury is quite fascinating. What could an American woman found dead at Old Sarum, a wealthy British lady found dead at the Tate Gallery in London and a second English woman found dead at Exeter Cathedral have in common? At first glance not much, except that they're all dead.

Inspector Jury discovers connections to New Mexico, and travels there to discover what else connected these women. Without giving any more of the plot away, it's quite an interesting story with a few interesting twists and turns.

Since I listened to the abridged audio cassette, I must mention Tim Curry's delightful performance. He gives distinct vocal characterizations to all the players in the story, and keeps you totally engrossed in the story. The only complaint I have is that a secondary plotline is not abridged very well, and its wrap up leaves a lot to be desired.

I've read the majority of Grimes' books, including several non-Jury ones and, actually I was quite disappointed with this one. It's long (over 400 pages) and tends to plod meandering between Jury, Plant, Wiggins, the inimitable Cripse family, but to me never really goes anywhere to adding to the story or, importantly, its resolution - more little vignettes of peoples lives rather than mystery tale. Naturally, there's Jury's ongoing personal dilemma of being constantly without female companionship and far too much time wasted on his self-analysis of quitting smoking, while other characters bog down the story with equal non-relevant issues.

The crimes are resolved over the final ten or so pages, with the previous text not really factoring into the story at all. I would have to say, not one of Ms. Grimes better efforts.

I discovered Martha Grimes and her Richard Jury series about three years ago and have been slowly working my way through. Generally speaking, they are terrific, interesting reads, with a lovable, eccentric cast of recurring characters that makes you look forward to picking up the next one in the series. But this one is a disappointment, the first time in the series I've felt that. Jury heads off to New Mexico, of all places, to solve a trio of tenuously related murders. Usually when you finish a well-written mystery, you can look back and see how all the disparate elements fit together to solve the murder, but in this one, you get done, and you think back to this scene or that scene and you think, "Huh?? What was that doing in there?" And worst of all, I figured out who the murderer was about halfway through without even really trying-- which makes you think that Grimes wasn't really trying. :-)

If you're new to Martha Grimes definitely don't start with this one. In fact, I might even recommend that you skip it. She seems bored with her formula in this one. She should have taken a break and written a novel about New Mexico that had nothing to do with Jury instead of this lame effort. I still have half a dozen or so to read to catch up with the ones that she's publishing now, I sincerely hope this isn't a trend.

Having read several of the Richard Jury novels years ago, I remembered why I stopped reading them when I started this one - chosen solely because I'm an English reader travelling to Santa Fe for the first time soon.

The chronological background of the book is ridiculous. It was written in the 1990's and is meant to be a contemporary setting, yet doesn't even remotely resemble the England I've lived in for the past 50 years. For example, there haven't been sweet shops such as the one she describes since the 1930's.

Richard Jury was supposedly a schoolboy during World War II, a fact made much of during the story. Even in the mid-1990's he'd be knocking on towards 60. The English part of the story is people with aristos and the gentility who mock the `ways' of the common folk, views which the reader seems to be expected to share. If it's meant as parody, it singularly fails to convince. If the book had been set in the 1920's the attitudes towards class of its characters might be more believable. Indeed, many of the 'characters' are merely ludicrous caricatures - e.g. the 'loveable'(read *very* sub-Dickensian, & wouldn't be out of place in a poor Dicken's knock-off 150 years ago) cockney-rogue family with a baby named Robespierre are deeply irritating, and their antics farcical. Perhaps the book - and this is true of the other Grimes crime I have read - is aiming for the surreal, but all it arouses in this reader is perplexity and irritation. Frankly, to portray England as like this in the 1990's is insulting. I don't read mysteries for the realism or the social analysis, I read to escape, but if the writer wants me to suspend disbelief she had better make a *bit* more of an effort not to get her setting so wildly incorrect.

The book also features two child-characters, one carried over from a previous book, both annoying rather than endearing or intriguing, which was apparently the intention.

I couldn't wait to finish it, and I mean that in the worst possible way.

Oh - the plot. The solution to the crime was obvious well before the end - and well before Richard Jury eventually tumbled to it - and it wasn't very original or clever, either, despite all the attempts at befuzzlement and mystification.

This book and series, though purportedly set in the UK, is certainly not meant for anyone who knows anything about us!

I went to the reviews of this book to see if her depictions of England were so irritatingly wrong as her descriptions of New Mexico. An earlier reviewer commented on that. This writer supposedly lives in Santa Fe, and yet has her characters walking to places a good 40 miles from where they started, seeing the Sandia Mountains from a part of town where they are not to be seen, the cop Onante describing Mary's caretaker as Hopi or Cochise, describing a "Santa Fe platter" on the menu at La Fonda as having red AND green chili (I know tourists are clueless about Chili in New Mexico, but even for a touristy place like La Fonda, this is a little much), posole with green chili, a Canyon Road that hasn't existed for 40 years, and a Durango, CO that hasn't existed for 50 years. Either this woman does not live in Santa Fe, or never leaves her house and gets all her information about the state from her psychic. And that just adds to the annoyance with the sloppy plotting, pointless twists (or rather, weak wiggles), and characters who add nothing to the story.

I seldom put down a book unfinished unless its total trash. I like to think that occasionally even a bad book can be saved by a skillful ending. But just one more glaringly wrong piece of information and I will toss this one.

(and don't even get me started on "Biting the Moon")

This is the 13th Jury and Plant mystery penned by the brilliant Grimes. Once again read by the amazing Tim Curry, Rainbow's End takes up just a "few weeks" after The Horse You Came In On ended. The newest case for Scotland Yard Chief superintendent Richard Jury, sees Jury again on the wrong side of the Pond. He is there to dismiss or confirm similarities among three mysterious deaths, two are British women - one dies in Exeter Catherdral and the second in the Tate Gallery. The Third was an American, one Angela Hope, a Santa Fe silversmith, while visiting the ancient hill fortress Old Sarum. He is not able to dismiss the threads that tie the three deaths together, but becomes convinced, since all three had recently been in New Mexico, USA, they are be connected. While Jury does the foot work in the US, he has set Melrose Plant to tracking down Lady Jenny Kennington. She vanished -literally - while at Straford-on-Avon.

Once again Grimes gives you a bang-on murder mystery with sleuth Jury hot on the trail of clues, and Melrose showing, as an amateur, his is a nifty investigator, too. Grimes humor shines, and is brought to life by Curry's wonderful reading. Sheer perfection from start to finish.

I got the book for a friend who loves Martha Grimes and she is very happy with it. She used to have the paperback but it fell apart and was looking for a hardback but couldn't find one so I found it for her on Amazon.

They were the only interesting characters in this entire mess, and the only reasons I even bothered with this book were because I liked the audio narrator, Donada Peters, and to find out what happened to Mary Dark Hope's sister Angela after reading Biting the Moon--a much better and surprisingly loathed book than this one--first. This boring, outdated British storyline only goes to show that you can't judge an author solely on one project. I loved its aforementioned successor and totally despised this boring slop. Oh, well, at least the Cripse kiddies made me laugh.

This is the second Grimes book I've read (both Richard Jury mysteries). I found the plots, with various twists and turns, to be believable and entertaining. The characters are well defined and easy to relate to, and there is good humor interspersed.

However, what I didn't like at all were the interminable descriptions of landscapes, scenes, even a cat! I also find Ms. Grimes' use of obscure/big words mildly irritating.

If all the excess verbage could be eliminated, I'd say these would be page turners. As they are, it's almost a chore to pick them up.

This is the first book I have read by Martha Grimes. I have to say she is a very good writer. "Rainbow's End" got me hooked from the very beginning to the end. This book has a wonderful plot and the characters are believeable and hilarious! The main character is Richard Jury and he has a suspicious beleif that these three "natural" deaths are connected and they were not "natural causes." He travels from Stonehenge, England to Sante Fe, New Mexico and discovers...well you read it for yourself!!! I reccommend this book for any avid mystery reader. You will love it!