Everything you need to understand or teach The Man with a Load of Mischief by Martha Grimes.
Despite the concern that Jury and Plant have for others, the characters are generally as alienated as any in the serious fiction of the twentieth century.
On a literal level, the recurring characters have few if any relatives; Jury, Plant, and Wiggins are all bachelors, and although each novel includes romantic interests for Jury and Plant (often, as in this novel, the same woman, Vivian Rivington), something always interferes with the progress of the romance. Even characters who have family and friends, however, often seem uncaring at best and murderous at worst. More than one murder victim's family is concerned with little more than the inconvenience the death causes them: In fact, Grimes depicts many of the worst human traits, and a tone of despair pervades the work. In this novel, Vivian Rivington discovers that she has been cruelly deceived by the people she was closest to because...
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