| Title | : | Last Seen Wearing (Inspector Morse, #2) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0804114919 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780804114912 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 326 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1976 |
Last Seen Wearing (Inspector Morse, #2) Reviews
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I met Inspector Morse many years ago on the TV screen, and he quickly became a favorite with me. After Morse, I graduated to Inspector Lewis, and then, of course, Endeavor. I decided a while back to seek out the original books and see if the character on the pages of Colin Dexter’s novels was as enthralling as the ones he spawned in film.
Only two books in, it is too early to say he is not, but it certainly looks that way. Not to say he isn’t interesting, intriguing, and roguishly familiar, but he has less depth than his celuloide counterparts. In fact, he is, like most novel detectives, very ordinary and cliche for me. It is not a genre that pulls me in. I loved Sherlock Holmes when I was young, and doted on Nancy Drew; I have enjoyed the occasional modern mystery, but as an adult, for the most part, I seem to always part ways with detective novels feeling a bit let down.
I like the human, flawed side of Morse, but this book had him missing the mark far too often to please me. In several instances, when he felt he had absolutely solved the mystery, I was going “but what about…” He also has less of what makes him lovable and more of what doesn’t–very boozy and adolescently sexual.
I am hoping this is just Colin Dexter before he got his feet and really knew who Morse was, but it might be that the writers for the series were just much better at defining a character than Dexter was. I might continue through the next book, or maybe I will just embrace the Morse in my head and abandon the books. -
In this second book of the "Inspector Morse" crime mystery series, entitled Last Seen Wearing the cogs and wheels of Colin Dexter's brain are really beginning to revolve. The number of false conclusions Morse leaps to is quite staggering. And embarrassingly I was with Inspector Morse in every blind alley he trundled up. Even when I thought (he and) I had guessed the answer, Colin Dexter deftly diverted my attention away from it, so that it was literally only in the final few pages that my vague suspicions consolidated into a correct analysis.
Morse and Lewis both seem to be settling happily into their designated roles for the series. It is startlingly different from the TV adaptation though on a number of points. Far from being the cultivated, fastidious intellectual portrayed on TV, Dexter's original seems permanently "randy as a goat", classing women variously as honeys, blowsy or careworn. (Though both depictions of the Inspector are able to accurately complete "The Times" crossword in under 10 minutes.)
I strongly suspect Dexter not only of writing his own character into that of Morse's, but also writing with a male audience in mind. I cannot see present-day female readers taking kindly to such over-simplistic categories, when the male characters have the privilege of being rather more carefully drawn. (But then considering the preponderance of post-feminist "Chicklit", maybe the ground rules have depressingly slipped back once more.)
Lewis is different too - stolid certainly, but older than Morse and not a Geordie.
But even greater than these differences is the actual FEEL of the book. Very little of the action takes place in Oxford. A fair bit is on motorways, or in London or North Wales. There's not even one perambulation around Oxford's Radcliffe Camera! I do wonder what Colin Dexter made of the liberties taken by the TV series. On the other hand I hope he begins to portray his female characters a little more fully in the the next book, rather than inserting ad-hoc sketchy stereotypes. The idea that this is acceptable because this is how the main character views them, really is a poor excuse. -
Last seen wearing her school uniform, Valerie Taylor disappeared a little over two years ago on her way back to her school in a small town near Oxford after having eaten lunch at home. Seventeen and very well-developed, Valerie had a taste for older men and after her parents reported her missing, Valerie was never seen again and her body was never found.
The police detective originally assigned to the case has continued to work it periodically, even though what little trail there was has long since gone cold. He may have turned up a new lead, but before he could report back to his superiors, the detective was killed in an auto accident, and only a few days later, Valerie’s parents receive a letter, allegedly from their missing daughter, saying only that she is still alive and well and that her parents should not worry about her.
The Superintendent now assigns the case to Chief Inspector Morse. Morse, whose principal interest is homicide, has no interest whatsoever in pursuing the case of a missing person. But he quickly convinces himself that, letter or no letter, Valerie Taylor has long since been dead and he sets himself to the task of finding her killer, assisted by his faithful sidekick, Sergeant Lewis.
It won’t be an easy job. There’s no physical evidence of any kind, especially after so much time has passed, and Morse quickly discovers that the people closest to Valerie may all have their reasons for wishing that the case would stay unresolved. Morse will be forced to formulate and discard any number of theories and as he turns up the heat, someone else will have to die so that the secret of what happened to Valerie Taylor will remain a mystery. It’s a tangled mess and only someone as clever and as unconventional as Morse will have a chance of resolving the mystery. Chief Inspector Morse is one of the most unique and compelling characters in British crime fiction, and it’s always fun to spend an afternoon watching him work.
I do have one minor nit to pick which is that, as the climax nears, Morse completely overlooks a major clue that is literally right in front of his face. As he struggles to make sense of something that seems to make no sense, the reader is left to holler at him to pay attention to what he’s seen with his own eyes. If he doesn’t snap to by the end of the book, the reader will be left knowing the solution while Morse is still at sea. Still, this is a minor quibble and Last Seen Wearing is a very enjoyable read. -
My first impression after reading was 'I have absolutely no idea what to think of this' and it took me a while to figure out why I felt so confused. Eventually I realized it was because I had never seen a detective in a crime-series having been so terribly wrong before. Really. Morse does spent most of the time being extremely wrong: he has a theory, a new clue appears that makes it clear that it can't have happened this way. Another theory. New clue. Repeat almost endlessly.
However these wrong theories aren't comnpletely wasted, many have just a tidbit that isn't completely wrong and collecting all those tidbits finally leads to the real solution (as it turns out he was wrong about having been wrong at one point...) However at no point it feels as if Morse is just aimlessly bumbling along, having no idea what's going on. His theories all make sense at the time. You might accuse him of always looking for the more complicated solution but then the actual solution is somewhat complicated (and it's not like Sherlock Holmes ever went for the easy solution, he just ended up being (almost) always right the first time).
I did like it but it was a bit too much and too concentrated towards the end. At first they had a theory, folowed up leads for a while, found something that disproved the theory, tried another theory. On the final 50 pages or so they just had theory after theory that got often got disproven only a few lines later and that did eventually get a bit riddiculous.
Overall one of those books where I want the half-star system because this was defenitely more than three but not quite four. -
4,25 stars - English Ebook
Quote: Morse was beset by a nagging feeling. Most of his fanciful notions about the Taylor girl had evaporated and he had begun to suspect that further investigation into Valerie's disappearance would involve little more than sober and tedious routine.-
After leaving home to return to school, teenager Valerie Taylor had completely vanished, and the trail had gone cold.
Until two years, three months and two days after Valerie's disappearance, somebody decides to supply some surprising new evidence for the case.
Which is fairly typical Morse. Lots of moving parts, multiple suspects, multiple motives, to the point where it gets confusing.
Morse is handed a three year old disappearance case, a cold case as they call it, a girl gone missing in her way home from school. No body, and the detective who handled the case was killed in a car accident, which I thing should be treated with more suspicion than it received. Did not understand that fact completely.
Ultimately, through a lot of muck and confusion, the whole thing just sort of petered out, with only a few broad conclusions drawn, but no real resolution.
Still the road to it is realy the "Morse road" and therefore good to me. Liked reading it. -
Interminably boring, I'd say !
The novel revolves around an unsolved criminal investigation involving the disappearance of a teenage girl. The story is full of red herrings and the overall plot is utterly perplexing to follow. New theories keep popping frequently, each one being aimlessly popped up.
Had it not been for those insightful quotes at the beginning of each chapter ( although they hardly seem to connect the reader to the plot ), I'd have rated it as 1/5. -
I didn't like this one at all. I found the constant stream of "I've solved it. Oh no, I'm wrong" to be interminably annoying.
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I'm pretty sure I stumbled on this series from one of the several bargain Kindle emails I get. Morse in print is definitely not the Morse on TV. The print Morse has risque thoughts, for one thing, though he seemingly represses them. Men are men and this just makes him seem a tad more real. For the case in this installment, he has plenty of risque thoughts which he does absolutely nothing about, though he definitely wishes that weren't so.
Morse and Lewis have too many ideas in this. Did Valerie Taylor, a school girl, just leave home one afternoon for parts unknown or is she dead? If dead (assume so) then who, how, why, etc.? Together they run through a variety of theories and run around trying to prove this one and then that one. There are no clues and honestly they don't have a clue where to begin and how to progress. And that makes this all the more real.
I don't have the next one on my shelf, but I'll be keeping my eyes open. Can I keep rating mysteries 4-stars? I suspect this is a series that is good enough for that rating but maybe most of the individual installments are just very good 3-stars, as is this one. -
Not nearly as charming and captivating as Endeavour (the TV show).
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It’s always a pleasure to return to the wonderful stories of Colin Dexter and Inspector Morse, that all too-human English detective who drinks too much and realizes he needs to place his collection of Victorian erotica in a less conspicuous place on his bookshelf.
In this case, Victoria Taylor, an attractive seventeen-year-old disappeared two years ago. Morse is handed the case following the death of Inspector Ainley who had just become interested following receipt of a note that Victoria was alive and did not want to be pursued. Morse is convinced she is dead and that possibly the real killer was sending the notes in hopes the investigation will cease. Lewis, Morse’s sergeant on the case, can’t understand Morse’s obsession with the case that Lewis believes is open-and-shut: the girl is alive and well in London and doesn’t want to be found. To his mind, Morse just insists on taking a simple case and making it into a complicated mish-mash.
This case has numerous false leads and Morse swings from a feeling of ecsatitic success at seeming to arrive at the solution only to have his idea dashed to the ground when the evidence fails to support his conclusions. In the end, one of those “false” inspirations proves to be the correct one. The coincidences are seemingly too much for Lewis, but as Morse points out, “It’s an odd coincidence, Lewis, that the forty-sixth word from the beginning and the forty-sixth word from the end of the Forty-sixth Psalm in the Authorised Version should spell ‘Shakespear.’ “ -
Last Seen Wearing by
Colin Dexter is the second Inspector Morse mystery. I've watched all of the episodes of the TV series based on the books and I've also enjoyed both the follow-on Lewis and the prequel, Endeavour. Having said all this, it was nice to find the the book was still fresh and as much as some of the story seemed familiar, I still had no idea where it was headed.
Morse is assigned a cold case by his chief, Superintendent Strange, because the previous inspector had been killed in a car accident. Morse doesn't want the case as it involves a missing girl; she'd been gone for two years. He wants murders, something he can sink his teeth into. However, forced to take the case, he asks for Sgt Lewis to be assigned to help him.
The case revolves around a few people, Valerie Taylor's parents, the new Head of her high school, her old French teacher and the assistant Head. The question to be answered is whether Valerie is dead or has run away? With many plodding first steps, the case begins to interest Morse. He's sure she is dead, but a letter purportedly from the girl, throws a spanner into his theory.
It was interesting to follow the investigation, the stops and starts, the threads that Morse and Lewis follow, have to backtrack, and then the new paths they lead to. I had my ideas about the case and parts came to fruition but the ultimate solution was still a nice twist and also very satisfying. Morse is an interesting inspector, smart, relying on intuition, often following the wrong path, but finding inspiration at the end. Lewis is a rock, more steady and reliable and helps keep Morse grounded. I've enjoyed both of the first two books so far and will continue to follow Dexter's stories of his great investigator (5 stars) -
A girl disappeared and has been presumed dead for more than two years; but is she even dead?
Reading this book was like walking through a maze: so many possible ways to go and so many of them wrong. (Here's the solution; oops, no, that's not it. HERE'S what happened; nope, nope, nope. Okay, this is it...this is what happened; wrong again.) In a word, it was great fun.
I'm particularly enjoying the development of Morse's and Lewis's relationship; Morse really does think highly of Lewis, but simply doesn't communicate that to the poor sergeant.
The one aspect of Morse that I'm having trouble reconciling with the television version of Morse, however, has to do with women. Of course we know that he likes the ladies, and that liking them too much sometimes gets in the way of his objectivity, but I was a bit taken aback when in the book Morse comes across a little pornography (which he puts aside for later) and visits a strip club—all in the course of doing his duty, of course—and seems to relish these case-related activities a little more than I would have guessed. I can't picture John Thaw experiencing either of these without looking a little abashed—or maybe I should watch the series again. -
This was a very enjoyable read again. I had been re-reading all of the books that are on kindle and Colin Dexter died with 2 days reading left in this book, So Sad. But he created a unique and memorable set of characters that are still entertaining millions of people.
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Dreadful. Morse is stupid and makes so many wrong guesses you wonder why he is allowed to work. Highly sexist, oggles pornography, implicitly racist and a bit thick. Plot meanders along to a wishy washy ending......hugely disappointing.
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Morse is assigned an old missing persons case, and he is quite peeved. Murder is his thing, don’t you know, not trying to find some girl who ran off with her boyfriend two years ago. But newly-anointed Chief Superintendent Strange is adamant — Morse willinvestigate the disappearance of Valerie Taylor, age 17 when she disappeared.
Morse and Lewis uncover a clue here and a clue there. For every clue, Morse develops a theory: Valerie is alive; Valerie was murdered by a lover/teacher; Valerie was murdered by her mother; Valerie is alive in London. All his theories prove to be incorrect, and not merely wrong, but spectacularly wrong.
Of course, he finally gets there in the end, after a real, honest-to-goodness, knife-in-the-back murder.
If you like your detective novels with a tortuous plot and lots of guessing and being wrong, you should love Last Seen Wearing. For me, it was just a bit too much. -
E' una piacevolissima conferma, questo Ispettore Morse. Stavolta prende ben più di una cantonata e sembra perdere le speranze ogni volta che le sue intuizioni lo portano verso l'assassino (sbagliato) e il movente (mai quello). Però è difficile chiudere il libro e fare qualcos'altro. Dalla seconda metà, dopo aver presentato caso e personaggi, ogni fine capitolo è un continuo colpo di scena e l'epilogo è una summa delle piste seguite. Forse un po' banale, rispetto al ritmo del romanzo, ma nulla toglie al fatto che Dexter sia capace di confezionare gialli intrigantissimi, davvero di grande livello. L'unica cosa che mi perplime è il comportamento di Morse con l'altro sesso, assolutamente rinunciatario e "autoarchiviante". Pur avendo i soliti pensieri alla vista di una donna, soffoca qualsiasi impulso d'iniziativa, quasi che avesse eliminato l'acchiappo dalla sua vita. Che poi sarà mica solo indagini e cadaveri. Aspetto il terzo.
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First Sentence: He felt quite pleased with himself.
More than two years ago, Valerie Taylor disappeared. Now, a letter is received saying she is alive. Inspector Morse has been assigned the case to learn the truth.
I read principally for character. When I don’t like the characters, I have a hard time getting through the book.
Other than his love of opera, there was little to like about Morse. He drinks too much, is into pornography and leaps to conclusions about the case, then trying to make the clues fit his conclusion. Sgt Lewis is strictly a side kick and given little notice at all.
Rather than real investigation being done there are a huge number of coincidences. The “procedure” of an investigation is seems disregarded at worst and is sloppy at best. A court would have a field day with the way in which evidence was, or wasn’t handled.
I found this a slog to get through. With so many other good British police procedural authors available, Dexter is one I’ll leave behind.
LAST SEEN WEARING (Pol Proc-Insp. Morse-England-Cont) – Poor
Dexter, Colin – 2nd in series
PAN Books, ©1976, UK Paperback – ISBN: 0330251481
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Inspector Morse, mystery #2 … in which a seemingly vanished and missing female student is feared to have been a victim of foul play. With dodgy parents and teachers, and the previous inspector on the case dying in a traffic accident, Morse and Lewis are giving a cold case with so many variables, half-truths and potential motives, sees them both really struggle to make any sense of it. Although written in the 1970s still not dated and a good read. 7 out of 12.
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Last Seen Wearing
10 out of 10
The horror of all horrors must be a flawed hero in what at least this reader is used to expect to admire as a story about the perfect detective, the one who understands the intricacies of the minds of criminals, can see the spot in what the others perceive as perfect, remembers every detail about the players in the Crime game, while the ordinary man or woman does not even remember who Claire or Elmer was, never minds the fact that his or her spoken French was quite good, while the written version was a calamity.
And yet this might be the most important, unexpected element in the mystery of Last Seen Wearing, where Inspector Morse is the main character, the one called to solve the case of a missing girl, Valerie Taylor, and before Last Seen Wearing, the under signed has seen Hercule Poirot find the guilty party even when it meant establishing that there were more than one killer, as in Murder on the Orient Express
http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/06/m..., the protagonist in Friday the Rabbi Slept Late untangles the plot, even if he is just an amateur, a very bright, intelligent, erudite rabbi, but no hunter of criminals
http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/07/f...
The surprise in this brilliant detective story is that the Inspector is wrong and not just once, but twice he envisages what has happened, only to find that the pieces of the puzzle do not fit the arrangement he has in mind although he does have some clues when he makes the second assumption and he is only thrown off the rails by the unexpected fluency in French and some spots on the face – which should have been somewhat expected he says, given that the partner has a beard…
Valerie Taylor is a teenager, learning at the Roger Bacon School in Oxford, when she disappears and the investigation into her vanishing is taken on by an inspector that dies in a car accident, just after he had been to London, presumably to follow in her footpaths and we are given to assume that he may have found some crucial evidence, which could conceivably have led him to solve the problem, only to take the response to his grave and have Inspector Morse take the lead from where he has left the investigation.
The hero is sure that Valerie has died, for quite a long time into the inquiry and he has quite a few suspects and scenarios that could have led to her death, which would be a murder, committed perhaps by the headmaster, Donald Phillipson, who had had an affair with the girl, just as he arrived in the small town for his interview, only to find later that the attractive, alluring young woman is in fact a student in the school where he is master and the supposition is that he could have killed, to escape an impossible situation.
There is a second headmaster, the rather loathsome Reginald Baines, the one who had been in competition for the first place in the hierarch of the school, lost and he is resentful, envious and scheming against his superior, especially once he finds and holds blackmailing material against the man that Morse and Lewis, the sergeant who helps him in the inquiry, assume has had intimate relations with the absent or dead girl.
The players in this Game of Hide and Seek act strangely and they raise suspicions either by the manner in which they conduct themselves when they are interviewed, or because clues in the documents and statement, sometimes both and the thorough Inspector Morse finds in the books that belonged to the missing Valerie that there is another person that could be involved, perhaps responsible of her disappearance, the French teacher, Acum, who has noted on an exercise that the girl had had to complete that the results are not good, there have been many mistakes, but also that she should see him at the end of her classes.
However, the first character that the inspector is sure has killed the girl is…her mother – here we might need a spoiler alert, presumably thinking somebody has reached this far, is interested in reading the story and does not want to know how such an appreciated work ends…by the way, it is included on the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read List
https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... and on the Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time list
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Top... on both the British and the American writers lists actually.
As for the spoiler alert, well, let us just try and limit the revelations to the first part, where Morse mistakenly works on the assumption that the mother is furious when she hears the girl is pregnant – something that appears to be established, although a lot of ‘facts’ are somehow elusive and statements would be later contradicted – and furthermore, he thinks of a vile scenario, in which the father, George Taylor, who is not her biological parent, could have been close to incest – though they have no relations – and anyway took part in the cover up, once faced with the murder committed by his wife and then used his position, which gave him access to a bulldozer and the dumping grounds for the refuse of the town to bury his step daughter there…there is also the role that Baines has played into all this, the question regarding letters sent by Valerie, which the inspector is sure that they have been falsified, and the problem of the money that do not appear to be justified in the accounts of Baines and the ones spent by Gwen Taylor.
Then Reginald Baines is killed with a kitchen knife and the interpretation is that Valarie’s mother, Gwen Taylor, after killing her own daughter in a rage over her revelations and assuming a villainous affair with her husband, has to eliminate Baines, the one we already know is Machiavelli, listens to the calls of the headmaster, must have been having sex with Gwen Taylor and found about the murder and thus needed to be killed, but not just because of the dangerous knowledge he had had, but also because he is such a vile man and the cheating wife would have had enough already of his presence in her bed.
All well and logical, except that Gwen Valerie has not killed neither her daughter, nor Reginald Baines and the suspicion now is that Valerie has done it….yes, it is possible, given that in this new perspective she is alive, living with…Professor Acum and willing to put an end to the life of the very stable genius of the provinces…alas, inspector Morse is again wrong – or isn’t he – for when he talks to the one he thinks is the missing girl, he finds her French astounding and besides, she has spots on her face…to be wrong once is all right, but to be wrong twice…OMG, this adds so much spice and surprise, novelty and energy to the formula -
I read most of the Morse novels over 30 years ago and then followed them up by watching the Morse TV series. I really hadn't realised, until I listened to this particular book, the extent of differences between the original books and what was done for television.
I got a little confused towards the end (or did I momentarily drop off to sleep?) with the result that I had to listen to the last hour again to be sure that I knew the way it all finished up.
LAST SEEN WEARING is #2 in the series and is full of red herrings and false threads. Morse leaps from one idea to another, often operating on a few dodgy facts, and drawing some shaky conclusions from them. He becomes very despondent after one theory after another bites the dust, but in the end he does get it right. It is a very wasteful way of doing detective work, and there is not much logic to it. All of this does make reading the novel a very academic exercise, and I guess that's what sets Colin Dexter apart from the rest.
But don't go away thinking that this Morse is the one you've seen John Thaw play.
He is a much coarser person, but I think by the time we get to later in the series some of these cruder bits have been toned down. -
I’m giving the Inspector Morse mysteries by Colin Dexter a go, having never read them before. I started with Book 1, which I enjoyed with reservations. I have had exactly the same experience with Book 2. The mystery is interesting, with lots of unexpected twists and turns. It focuses on a cold case of a missing girl, who disappeared on her way to school at the age of seventeen. The detective working the case concluded she had run away with a man, but now that detective is dead. Only a few days later, the parent of the dead girl receive a letter from her telling them not to worry. Suspicions are raised, and Morse is assigned the case. He believes the girl is dead, and so he sets out to find the murderer. However, every time he thinks he has come close to solving the case, something happens to up-end all his suppositions.
I don’t find the character of Inspector Morse very likeable in these books. He seems to bumble round, leaping to conclusions, then trying to force the facts to fit his theories. He is also, I am sad to say, a misogynist with a taste for pornography. The depiction of women was my major problem in Book 1, and it is even more marked in Book 2. I understand that the book was published in 1976, and that it is aimed for a male readership, but it still makes me uncomfortable. The saving grace for me with this series so far has been the pleasure Colin Dexter takes with playing with language in his plots – Inspector Morse’s facility with crosswords and other word puzzles adds a welcome intelligence to the plot.
You might be interested in my review of Book 1 in the series, Last Bus to Woodstock. -
2.5 like the last one, I'm afraid.
These work perfectly fine as mysteries (the plotting is actually pretty good and I do like that Morse's theories miss the mark more often than not; perfect detectives are a bit boring after all) but goodness are these books sexist. I know the early installments of the series were written in the seventies, but there are books where the publication date doesn't show quite this much.
So far, my initial verdict that the TV series are actually better than the books still stands. (I don't mind desaster humans, I do mind horny, sexist desaster humans.) -
this seems the best Morse I've read so far. Morse here is even more of an old soak and an old lecher than usual, but also more mistaken than usual. The plot is quite original too. Not do the pieces manage to fall quite so neatly into place as one would expect
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Commento breve: avevo ragione io, Sherlock Holmes levate.
Commento lungo. "Last seen wearing" è un giallo da "secolo scorso". Si percepisce che è stato scritto quando non si poteva contare su ricerche via internet e su profili facebook, e questo in parte è il suo fascino. L'elemento preponderante del romanzo è indubbiamente il protagonista. L'ispettore Morse è sicuro di sé, arrogante, pieno di vizi e generalmente in torto. Il lettore segue le indagini una pista sbagliata dietro l'altra, mentre la soluzione si dipana come un puzzle disordinato davanti ai suoi occhi, fino a risolversi più o meno nel finale.
Dico "più o meno" perché se il colpevole (o i colpevoli) è chiaro, il movente un po' meno. Probabilmente a una rilettura più attenta magari potrebbe essere intuito, ma francamente ho poca voglia di scandagliare il libro a ritroso per capirlo. Un paio di righe in più, nel finale, imho non avrebbero fatto male. -
Not more than 2 stars for me, perhaps even 1,5, and it is not usual. But I did not like this book, in many ways. Morse discovers something, and they do not tell us what it is; he receives a disclosure by phone, or by mail, and we can not know what is about; he or Lewis has an idea, but we have to read many more pages to understand it. Moreover they struggle with many false theories, one crazier of the other, in my opinion with no clues at all to prove them. There are a lot of stereotypes about women. The solution in the end is farfetched. I found this book a difficult reading and not enjoyable at all.
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Alla seconda lettura, dopo un paio di decenni dalla prima, i gialli di Colin Dexter mostrano un pochino la corda: l'essere intrappolati in quel limbo cronologico tra la contemporaneità e l'età aurea del giallo inglese (prima metà del novecento, a mio modo di vedere) li fa avvertire polverosi più che classici. Ciò premesso, rimangono comunque un esempio chiarissimo di mistery britannico, con il suo studio dei caratteri e i continui twist investigativi. Sarebbero più corrette le tre stelle e mezzo, ma per l'affetto verso E. Morse arrotondo volentieri per eccesso.
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This was delightful, a big improvement over Last Bus to Woodstock. An oversexed high school girl goes missing. Is she dead? We don't find out until the very end. The also-oversexed Inspector Morse, and his dutiful sidekick Sergeant Lewis, concoct theories and butt heads from Oxford to London to Wales. I like a lowly genre writer who throws new vocabulary at me, like that batrachian croak. (Froglike, amphibian.)
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3,5. Tok seg kraftig opp etter ca. 50 prosent.
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I liked this book. If there's one thing that annoys me about detective novels, its that the detectve always seems to get things right, they are never wrong. Well here Morse and Lewis get plenty of things wrong. Laughed out loud when Morse corrects Lewis's grammar mistakes when reading up on Lewis theory, he had written while he was ill in bed!re-read June 2015
