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.
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