Last Seen Wearing — Colin Dexter

How does a dead girl write?
Her boyfriend lie?
A policeman die?

LAST SEEN WEARING
More than two years ago, Valerie Taylor, a seventeen-year-old pupil at the Roger Bacon School, near Oxford, disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Inspector Morse's colleagues in the force, despite exhaustive enquiries, discovered nothing at all. So why reopen the case now, with the clues long cold and memories failing? Surely hundreds of girls run away from home every year and make their way to the bright lights of the big city. Morse preferred a body: a body dead from unnatural causes. And very soon he got one.

Chief Inspector Morse, Homicide Division, Oxford: A lonely middle-aged bachelor with a taste for Mozart, T.S. Eliot, and pints of bitter -- and an obsession with attractive women. As coarse as he is cunning, at times insufferable, relentlessly inquisitive.