Vertigo 42

Over drinks at a bar perched high above the City of London, Detective Richard Jury is introduced to Tom Williamson, a friend of an acquaintance. Tom is certain that his wife, Tess, was killed seventeen years ago, even though the authorities recorded her death as an accident caused by her vertigo. Jury agrees to take a second look at the case.

Soon the past seems to reach forward. A young girl died in a fall at a children's party held at Tom and Tess's house twenty-two years earlier, and the two deaths may be linked. Then a well-dressed woman plunges from a tower beside a pub that Jury and his colleagues often visit, and her separated husband is later found dead. Jury begins to suspect that the grown-up guests from that long-ago party hold the answers.

The novel is part of Martha Grimes's long-running series featuring Richard Jury, a Scotland Yard detective.