WHEN Central Television was preparing to make its final episode of the

award-winning drama, Morse, it approached the character's creator, Colin

Dexter, and asked him if he'd mind terribly if they killed off the

irascible Oxford detective in the final reel. ''Over my dead body,'' was

the stark reply. The man with no Christian name was, after all, the

author's bread and butter.

Thank goodness Mr Dexter stuck to his guns. Had he not then we would

be deprived of The Daughters of Cain (Macmillan, #14.99), a splendid new

Morse mystery set once again amid the city of dreaming spires. This time

round old Morse is feeling his age and considering an early bath. Could

retirement be just around the corner?

Then Dr Felix McClure, late of Wolsey College, Oxford, is found dead

from a single stab wound. The crime is apparently motiveless and the

murder weapon is conspicuously absent. Within the first few chapters the

finger of suspicion falls upon Edward Brooks, the former caretaker of

the college rooms, a thoroughly odious and disreputable character who

abuses his long-suffering wife and sells drugs to the students.

Just as Morse and his trusted sidekick, Sergeant Lewis, prepare to

pounce upon Brooks, he disappears. When his body turns up in a river,

bearing a similar knife wound to his victim, the detectives have to find

out who killed the killer. There is no shortage of suspects -- his wife,

his beautiful step-daughter, and an enigmatic schoolteacher all with

good reason to see him dead -- but they all appear to have cast-iron

alibis.

The Daughters of Cain is a delicious and complex tale of murder which

sees Dexter back on top form after last year's Morse's Greatest Mystery,

a rather disappointing collection of short stories.

Robert B. Parker takes a welcome break from his Spenser PI novels with

All Our Yesterdays (Viking, #14.99p), an epic tale of blackmail,

betrayal, obsession, and corruption covering three generations of an

Irish-American cop family. It is an ambitious novel which has its

origins with the IRA in 1920s Dublin, moves quickly to the streets of

Prohibition Boston, and on to modern-day organised crime. At its centre

is the emotional entanglement of two families, the Sheridans with their

hard, Irish cop traditions, and the Winslows, old Boston aristocrats

with power and money. Though vast in scope, All Our Yesterdays is only a

qualified success. Parker lacks depth and the storyline is a little too

predictable.

Jonathan Kellerman's durable LA-based criminal psychologist, Dr Alex

Delaware, is back in Self-Defence (Little, Brown, #15.99) with a

haunting story about a young woman's troubled past. Jury service in a

particularly gruesome serial murder trial sparks off some harrowing

childhood memories for Lucy Lowell. Plagued by a recurring nightmare,

she turns to Delaware for help. With a few sessions of hypnotic

regression, the doctor takes Lucy back in time to the weekend she spent

with her now estranged father (a world-famous writer and artist) during

which she apparently witnessed a murder. Delaware must decide whether

Lucy's fears are delusions or reality.

The Conservative Party has been something of a breeding ground for

would-be novelists in recent years. In terms of quality, some (like

Julian Critchley and Michael Dobbs) have been successful; others (like

Lord Archer and Edwina Currie) have been abject failures. But into the

former category falls Peter Rawlinson, the former Solicitor General and

Attorney General, and one of England's finest barristers.

Indictment for Murder (Orion, #15.99), his fourth novel, is a

first-rate courtroom drama about a High Court judge on trial for the

murder of a wartime friend. It is a compulsive read -- the court case is

absolutely riveting -- from a man who obviously knows what he is talking

about.

Finally this month comes John Sandford's high shock-count Night Prey

(HarperCollins, #14.99) in which the author's Minneapolis-based cop

Lucas Davenport finds himself on the trail of a psycho serial killer

with a predilection for picking up his female victims at book-store

readings. Though Sandford writes with a savage skill in this policier he

fails to hold the reader's attention. Half-way through you begin to

wonder why he bothered.