I could pretty much copy and paste the review of the last Morse one here. This one is good and irritating in just the same ways, again with the good outweighing the irritating to a large degree. I suppose this is exactly what you want from a series: reassuring predictability.

The main manifest difference between this one and the last is the setting. Where that was effectively a historical mystery, this one is set in the (then) present, as Morse investigates the disappearance of a Swedish student last seen wandering around near Oxford. The plot unfolds in a way that conveniently allows both protagonist and author the chance to indulge their interests in seamy, seedy things, and prompts the contemporary reader to boggle at the lengths to which people would go in the early 1990s to access pornography. I could perhaps have done with a bit less of all that.

The present-day setting also makes it much more apparent just how contrived the novel is. All novels are contrivances, of course, but there’s no real attempt here to hide it: we are very much being treated to a display of how clever both protagonist and author are, not at all to anything like a realistic police procedural, whatever the nods in that direction. Again, this is both irritating and good; irritating because nobody likes a show-off, good because the puzzle and the contrivance really are quite clever. Perhaps I’ll end up re-reading all the Morses, though perhaps not in a binge.

Minor notes for one’s own clever-clogs satisfaction: (a) both this Morse and the last make passing reference to Uppsala—does this happen in every Morse?; (b) one of the smart-alec epigraphs is wrongly attributed. Nothing more satisfying than correcting a clever-clogs.