Forgotten Book: SERVICE OF ALL THE DEAD, Colin Dexter

For many of my contributions this year to Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten Books I am focussing on the books I read 20 years ago in 1992. By then my reading diet was almost exclusively crime fiction.

So my recent posts for this meme have largely been about authors that I "discovered" in that year.

1992 was a year of discovery for me with me authors, well known now, that I discovered had written a large number of books. many of these I have already focussed on with my "forgotten books" this year.

My choice this week is SERVICE OF ALL THE  DEAD by Colin Dexter. 
Published in 1979, this was early, #4, in the Morse series (did you realise there were actually only 13 of them?), and Dexter became another author I explored in 1992.

Synopsis (Fantastic Fiction)

Chief Inspector Morse, a middle-aged bachelor with a fondness for crossword puzzles, Mozart, and attractive women, investigates a series of suspicious and sinister events at Oxford's Church of St. Frideswide. 

That doesn't actually tell you a lot does it?

Wikipedia tells us a bit more, hopefully not too much.

This time Inspector Morse brings the imposition on himself. 
He could have been vacationing in Greece instead of investigating a murder that the police have long since written off. But he finds the crime – the brutal killing of a suburban churchwarden – fascinating. 
In fact, he uncovers not one murder but two, for the fatal fall of St. Frideswides vicar from the church tower Morse reckons to be murder as well.
And as he digs into the lives and unsanctified lusts of the late vicar's erring flock, the list of the dead grows longer. Not even the oddly appealing woman he finds scrubbing the church floor can compensate Morse for the trouble he's let himself in for. 
So he has another pint, follows his hunches, and sets out to untangle the deadly business of homicide.