The riddle of the third mile

What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.

What this book is about

A torso — headless and legless — is found in the Oxford Canal. Inspector Morse's investigation leads him to Lonsdale College, where a don has gone missing, and to the increasingly murky world of Oxford's academic politics. Colin Dexter's sixth Morse novel is his most deliberately gruesome in its initial discovery — the torso's condition is noted precisely for the purpose of making identification difficult — and one of his most intricate in its misdirection. Morse's reasoning leads him one way and then another before arriving at a solution that seems inevitable in retrospect.