Witty Little Knitter

It's a bit hard to rate this book. One the one hand there are things that make it quite clear that this book was written in the 70s...and by things I mean some blatant sexism. While it (fortunately) never goes so far to blame the murdered girl for getting murdered it becomes quite clear that both Morse and Lewis clearly disapprove of her lifestyle-choices (i.e. being sexually active) and there are somne cringeworthy conclusions (she didn't wear a bra! -> Perhaps she was a prostitute!) which leave a bad taste.Now it's arguable if you can blame a book for the time it was written in and it's probably not worse than most of the other books written around that time.If you can ignore that bit what remains is a great puzzle. I admittedly did figure out some things beforehand but not really because it was blatantly obvious but because I had already seen some Morse-episodes (not the adaption of this one...but enough to know certain things). There were red herrings en masse and trying to figure out what was important and what was not was great fun.And of course there's Morse himself. Despite being written over 40 years ago he was a breath of fresh air (yes, I do apologise for this phrase but for once it is accurate) in all those bland crime-novel-main characters. Too many authors want to write characters that are both likeable and easy for the reader to identify with. That makes easy reading but also means that I can't remember the names of half of the MCs in crime-novels I read recently because they were all quite similar (some had as distinguishing feaute a Very Tragic Past). Morse is on the first glance neither likeable (he is quite a jerk to Lewis and really also most others) nor that easy to identify with (unless you are an opera-loving crossword-nerd and grammar-nazi) but that makes him unique and ironically as a result likeable as character (I'm still debating if I'd like to met him ^^) because unlike so many others he has edges, makes mistakes because he is bloody stubborn and that distinguishes from at least 2/3 of all other invesigators.