Synopsis
Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger award, The Wench is Dead is the eighth novel in Colin Dexter's Oxford-set detective series. As portrayed by John Thaw in ITV's Inspector Morse.
That night he dreamed in Technicolor. He saw the ochre-skinned, scantily clad siren in her black, arrowed stockings. And in Morse's muddled computer of a mind, that siren took the name of one Joanna Franks . . .
Early in the morning of the 22nd of June, 1859, the body of Joanna Franks was found floating at Duke’s Cut along the Oxford Canal – an event which led to the trial and hanging of two suspected murderers.
A hundred and thirty years later Chief Inspector Morse is bedbound and recovering from a perforated ulcer at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital when he is handed an old book to read, one that recounts the trial of a murder aboard the Barbara Bray canal boat: the murder of Joanna Franks. Investigating the account of the trial, Morse begins to question whether the two men hanged were truly guilty and sets out to prove his suspicions from the confines of his hospital bed . . .
The Wench is Dead is followed by the ninth Inspector Morse book, The Jewel That Was Ours.
Details
04 September 2008
9780330468909Reviews
Traditional crime writing at its best; the kind of book without which no armchair is completeSunday Times
No one constructs a whodunit with more fiendish skill than Colin DexterThe Guardian
Dexter has created a giant among fictional detectivesThe Times
A character who will undoubtedly retain his place as one of the most popular and enduring of fictional detectivesP. D. James, Sunday Telegraph
