Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter

I started watching Endeavour on PBS last year.  If you haven’t seen the show and are a fan of procedurals and especially a fan of British procedurals, you must give this series a try.  Endeavour Morse is a young Detective Inspector on the Oxford City Police CID.  He has very blue collar roots but is an Oxford dropout who has somehow trained his incredible intelligence and curiosity on detective work.  The series is the prequel to the Inspector Morse series which ran for many seasons (and which I have never watched).  Curiously, the sequel series – Inspector Lewis – is also running at this time.  All this by way of introduction to Last Bus to Woodstock which is the first novel in the Inspector Morse series.  It is a grim but gripping tale of the murder of a young office worker outside a local pub who was last seen waiting for the “last bus to Woodstock” a suburb of Oxford.  We are introduced to Morse (whose first name we do not learn) – a hard drinking, crosswork puzzle solving, sports car loving senior detective on the Oxford force who quite possibly fancies himself as a ladies man.  The novel has an appropriate number of twists, turns and rabbit trails and a reasonably satisfying conclusion.  SPOILER ALERT.  The only thing I will say is that the novels – like the series – tend to have murderers who come from the most ordinary walks of life and the rich and powerful are frequently suspected but never arrested.