Rather more gore than I like, but intriguing, more than a little improbable. I’m always surprised Morse escapes disciplinary procedures, as he’s more outrageous than Rebus, who’s always in trouble with the high heid yins! But autres pays, autres mœurs! The Edinburgh polis presumably have stricter rules.
One good thing about Dexter is that he varies format and style (within the givens of “murder(s) >investigation>false trails>Morse gets there in the end, but Lewis does all the donkey work!”
Dexter didn’t write so many novels that he began to recycle old plots and themes, cf Christie, and the social milieu is varied, cf Sayers.
(I expect Morse would have taken me to task over punctuation in that last sentence!)
I don’t really believe in Morse’s failure to graduate because of an unhappy student love affair. It seems too much of a rationalisation, an excuse visible through that amazing instrument, the retrospectoscope, which isn’t always well focused.
Samuel West’s narration is excellent, as usual, no comic music hall accents- which drive those who speak with the genuine version to stamp on their phones in despair. It takes a really good actor to manage Welsh, Scots, London, Lancashire,etc.,convincingly and unemphatically.
He performs well, without turning the whole thing into an amateur dramatics melodrama, which some lesser narrators are wont to do. (Italian language audiobooks worst offenders.)