The Wench is Dead
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger award, The Wench is Dead is the eighth novel in Colin Dexter's Oxford-set detective series. As portrayed by John Thaw in ITV's Inspector Morse.
That night he dreamed in Technicolor. He saw the ochre-skinned, scantily clad siren in her black, arrowed stockings. And in Morse's muddled computer of a mind, that siren took the name of one Joanna Franks . . .
Early in the morning of the 22nd of June, 1859, the body of Joanna Franks was found floating at Duke’s Cut along the Oxford Canal – an event which led to the trial and hanging of two suspected murderers.
A hundred and thirty years later Chief Inspector Morse is bedbound and recovering from a perforated ulcer at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital when he is handed an old book to read, one that recounts the trial of a murder aboard the Barbara Bray canal boat: the murder of Joanna Franks. Investigating the account of the trial, Morse begins to question whether the two men hanged were truly guilty and sets out to prove his suspicions from the confines of his hospital bed . . .
The Wench is Dead is followed by the ninth Inspector Morse book, The Jewel That Was Ours.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fans will not be disappointed in the reappearance of the irascible yet loveable Inspector Morse, the Oxford policeman who investigates the underside of his beautiful city. This time Dexter employs his lucid prose to describe a century-old murder on the meandering Oxford canal, a case chanced upon by Morse in his reading while hospitalized for an ulcer. Inevitably, there will be comparisons with Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time , in which her sleuth simultaneously convalesces and cogitates upon Richard III, accused of the murder of his two nephews. Dexter's tale is the better of the two. The interior narrative, that of a fetching young woman who meets death during a night-shrouded canal voyage, is placed in a contemporary story in which Morse engages in marvelous repartee with his loyal Sergeant Lewis, with a winsome female librarian and with others who aid him in researching the crime. A surprising and inspired solution concludes a jolly good read that juxtaposes past and present Oxford with imagination and finesse. A new series of Inspector Morse mysteries is airing on PBS. 20,000 first printing; Mystery Guild alternate.
