Book 16 of 2012: Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter

Ages ago I got Mr Click the complete set of Colin Dexter's Morse series and he's been steadily working his way through them recently. Last Seen Wearing is the second in the series and I'm quite a bit behind Mr Click; by the time I started this one he'd already finished the third one.

This book follows Morse as he picks up a cold case involving Valerie Taylor, a teenager who went missing a couple of years before. Another detective was investigating the disappearance at the time that he was killed and it's suspected that he may have come across a new lead but Morse and Lewis are going to have to find out what that was.

I found this was a pretty quick read. I was able to sit down and get through big chunks all in one go, which I like to do. Although it's a detective story, it's a fairly easy read; the sort of thing I'd probably opt for if I was travelling off the island every day (though given my commute to University was two and a half hours each way, it probably would've taken me just about a day and a half to read).

Although it was a quick and easy to read, at times it was was a little tricky to follow the actual process of Morse's investigation. It's nothing to do with the way it's written, it's just that Morse makes these random leaps in logic which sucks a bit of the fun out because you can't try to figure out the crime yourself. I like trying to work out who the killer is or what actually happened to the person they're trying to find, it's part of the reason why I like crime books.

There was a bit of a twist in the story, you're led to believe one thing, then that's dismissed as being wrong, then you find out that it's actually right. I figured it out and then felt completely thrown when I thought I was wrong. I did like that. Though I think I might have seen a TV adaptation of this one so I had a funny feeling that I knew what was coming all the way through.

There was a bit of let down at the end because although the case is solved, you don't seem to get any closure. That wasn't really a bad thing, but it was certainly different to what I was expecting at the end.