Will I love Last Bus to Woodstock?

Colin Dexter immediately pulls me into what reads as a real world.

The writing is so beautiful, I’m not aware of anything but the story. The chapters are delightfully short and tight, so much so that the pages absolutely flow past.

I prefer reading books that, even though they are clearly fiction, read as true crime stories. When I read a Colin Dexter Morse mystery, I am unaware of pages, chapters, sentences, punctuation. I am allowed to be totally immersed in the story. The casts of perfectly drawn characters in each story always intrigue me.

Morse is flawed, a quality… show more.

I chose this book as it was the one that introduced me to Morse, not the code but the Detective Chief Inspector. Apart from being an excellent crime solver, he is also a superb Times crossword solver. I liked that this cerebral activity was a clue in itself to his method of disentangling the threads linking the criminal to the murder. In that respect, he resembles Poirot, like Morse, a man of limited physical activity.

I found the man, rather than the policeman, was an enigma. He can be charming, but mostly he’s curt, cranky, and cynical. He has a… show more.

This is the first book that introduces us to one of my favourite crime solving duos—Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis. I love both these characters and how they interact together. I also love the fact that Oxford, where the stories are set, feels like another character too. In this story, Morse must investigate the murder of a young woman who missed the last bus home. The plot is complex with each strand expertly woven together and there are plenty of clues and red herrings too.