The Award Tally

The Wench Is Dead

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The Wench Is Dead won the CWA Gold Dagger award. That night he dreamed in Technicolor. He saw the ochre-skinned, scantily clad siren in her black, arrowed stockings. And in Morse's muddled computer of a mind, that siren took the name of one Joanna Franks. Early in the morning of the 22nd of June, 1859, the body of Joanna Franks was found floating at Duke's Cut along the Oxford Canal - an event which led to the trial and hanging of two suspected murderers. A hundred and thirty years later Chief Inspector Morse is bedbound and recovering from a perforated ulcer at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital when he is handed an old book to read, one that recounts the trial of a murder aboard the Barbara Bray canal boat: the murder of Joanna Franks. Investigating the account of the trial, Morse begins to question whether the two men hanged were truly guilty and sets out to prove his suspicions from the confines of his hospital bed.

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Publisher
Inspector Morse Mysteries
Year
2024
ISBN-13
9781035005468
Genre
Crime & Thriller
Topics
Cold case murder investigationHistorical crime reexaminationWrongful conviction