Service Of All The Dead

A quiet church, a respectable congregation, and the faint but persistent suspicion that holiness is not an effective crime deterrent.

Service of All the Dead finds Inspector Morse once again navigating Oxford’s polished surfaces and discovering, with minimal surprise, that beneath them lies the usual assortment of secrets, grudges, and carefully managed appearances. This time the setting leans ecclesiastical: clergy, parish life, ritual, and the comforting assumption that nothing too dreadful could possibly happen in such a place.

Dexter, of course, has other ideas.

What follows is a neatly tangled investigation where the sacred and the suspicious sit side by side. Morse approaches it all with his familiar combination of intellect, irritability, and a tendency to make connections that arrive just ahead of everyone else’s patience. There are clues, red herrings, quiet revelations, and the steady sense that the truth is both closer and more inconvenient than anyone would like.

There is a pleasing irony at the heart of it. A “service of all the dead” suggests solemn remembrance and orderly reflection. In Dexter’s world, it also provides a backdrop for motives that are anything but serene. Even the most respectable institutions, it turns out, have their human complications.

This good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books, is ideal for readers of classic British crime, Inspector Morse, Oxford mysteries, and anyone who enjoys a detective story where intellect does most of the running and respectability does very little of the protecting.

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