The dust jacket of Colin Dexter's latest whodunit proclaims that it's "the final Inspector Morse novel." That's the bad news.
The good news: "The Remorseful Day" (Crown. $24) is so good that the reader's eyes move slowly, savoring, delaying the moment when the book must end.The beginning of the story is a puzzlement. Morse drags his feet, reluctant to take on a particular case.
Then he is ordered by his soon-to-retire boss, Chief Superintendent Strange, to reopen investigation of the year-old murder of a rather promiscuous nurse in her Lower Swinstead home, Strange orders Morse's favorite and faithful No. 2 man, Sergeant Lewis, to help.
It's a simple case, or should be, but it's also complicated.
People dying off should make the case simpler, but Lewis can't sort it out, and neither will most readers. Morse does. As Dexter writes: "(Lewis) had ever been a champion of the cumulative-evidence approach to crime: a piece-by-piece aggregation against a suspect that gradually mounted into an impressively documented pile. Morse's method was occasionally very different."
Strange calls Morse "the most brilliant mind I ever encountered in the whole of my police career."
Dexter wrote 13 Inspector Morse books. With no new books to look forward to, fans thirsting for Morse are just going to have to re-read the old ones.