Last Bus to Woodstock

Last Bus to Woodstock is the first in Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse series, and I found myself making Morse and Lewis look like the actors in the PBS Mystery series. I liked this book and particularly enjoyed some of the conversational interchanges, which I read aloud to innocent family members. I went along quite easily until quite close to the end of the book, and then I just didn't get it. I didn't get the guilty party's whole persona. It seemed to me that all of a sudden a whole new person had been grafted onto the person that had been. I have another in the series, but I won't seek out the rest.

from the back of the book:

Beautiful Sylvia Kaye and another young woman had been seen hitching a ride not long before Sylvia's bludgeoned body is found outside a pub in Woodstock, near Oxford. Morse is sure the other hitchhiker can tell him much of what he needs to know. But his confidence is shaken by the cool inscrutability of the girl he's certain was Sylvia's companion on that ill-fated September evening. Shrewd as Morse is, he's also distracted by the complex scenarios that the murder set in motion among Sylvia's girlfriends and their Oxford playmates. To grasp the painful truth, and act upon it, requires from Morse the last atom of his professional discipline.