Collect Last Seen Wearing (Inspector Morse, #2) Developed By Colin Dexter Visible In Softcover

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/.
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, 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. 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 Dexters 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 isnt 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 doesntvery 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.

Valerie Taylor has been missing since she was a sexy seventeen, more than two years ago.
Inspector Morse is sure she's dead, But if she is, who forged the letter to her parents saying "I am alright so don't worry" Never has a woman provided Morse with such a challenge, for each time the pieces of the jigsaw start falling into place, someone scatters them again.
So Valerie remains as tantalizingly elusive as ever, Morse prefers a bodya body dead from unnatural causes, And very soon he gets one 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 dont 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 wasnt handled.


I found this a slog to get through, With so many other good British police procedural authors available, Dexter is one Ill leave behind,

LAST SEEN WEARING Pol ProcInsp, MorseEnglandCont Poor
Dexter, Colinnd in series
PAN Books,, UK Paperback ISBN:

Im giving the Inspector Morse mysteries by Colin Dexter a go, having never read them before.
I started with Book, which I enjoyed with reservations, I have had exactly the same experience with Book, 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 upend all his suppositions.


I dont 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, and it is even more marked in Book.
I understand that the book was published in, 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 Morses facility with crosswords and other word puzzles adds a welcome intelligence to the plot.


You might be interested in my review of Bookin the series, Last Bus to Woodstock.

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 underminutes.


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 presentday female readers taking kindly to such oversimplistic categories, when the male characters have the privilege of being rather more carefully drawn.
But then considering the preponderance of postfeminist "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 adhoc sketchy stereotypes.
The idea that this is acceptable because this is how the main character views them, really is a poor excuse.
Morse is assigned an old missing persons case, and he is quite peeved, Murder is his thing, dont you know, not trying to find some girl who ran off with her boyfriend two years ago.
But newlyanointed Chief Superintendent Strange is adamant

Morse willinvestigate the disappearance of Valerie Taylor, agewhen 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, honesttogoodness, knifeintheback 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, 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 cluball in the course of doing his duty, of courseand seems to relish these caserelated activities a little more than I would have guessed.
I can't picture John Thaw experiencing either of these without looking a little abashedor maybe I should watch the series again.

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