The Wench is Dead

<p><b>Winner of the Gold Dagger award for best crime novel of the year<i>, The Wench is Dead</i> is the eighth novel in Colin Dexter's Oxford-set detective series.</b><br><br><i>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 . . .</i><br><br>Early in the morning of the 22nd of June, 1859, the body of Joanna Franks was found floating at Duke&rsquo;s Cut along the Oxford Canal- an event which led to the trial and hanging of two suspected murderers.<br><br>A hundred and thirty years later Chief Inspector Morse is bedbound and recovering from a perforated ulcer at Oxford&rsquo;s John Radcliffe Hospital and handed an old book to read, one which recounts the trial of a murder aboard the Barbara Bray canal boat: the murder of Joanna Franks. Inv