Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse endures because he is more interesting than the cases he solves. A man of fierce intelligence, personal difficulty and considerable stubbornness, operating in a setting — Oxford, its colleges and hierarchies — that he understands far better than it understands him. The crimes matter. Morse matters more.

Readers who love that combination — detective as character study, setting as active participant, plot as the mechanism that reveals the man — will find something very familiar in Kerry Costello’s The Long Game.

DS Gibson: A Proper Detective

Detective Sergeant Gibson is no Morse, in the sense that he is not operating at the level of Oxford University or classical music or crossword puzzles. He is a working detective in Swinton and Pendlebury, the industrial North West, driving between terraced streets and working men’s pubs and colliery records. But the quality of his mind, and the quality of the novel’s attention to that mind, is recognisably in the Morse tradition.

Gibson is a man who notices things. He is sceptical of easy explanations. He is prepared to follow a hunch deep into territory where it might come to nothing, and he does so with a quiet, dry persistence that has more in common with doggedness than brilliance — though the brilliance is there. He has a marriage that grounds him and a boss, the formidable DCI Watson, who simultaneously obstructs and inadvertently assists. The dynamic between them will be immediately familiar to anyone who has spent time with Morse and Sergeant Lewis.

A World as Precisely Drawn as Oxford

One of the great pleasures of the Morse novels is their Oxford — not the tourist version, but the real city, with its politics, its class tensions, its ancient corruption. The Long Game does something comparable with the mining communities of the North West.

Swinton and Pendlebury in the post-war decades are drawn with documentary care. The terraced streets, the colliery, the men who spent their working lives underground, the communities that formed around the pit — all of it is rendered so precisely that you can smell the coal dust. This is not generic industrial landscape. It is a specific, deeply observed world, and the crimes grow directly out of it.

Patient, Methodical, Satisfying

The Long Game moves at the pace of a real investigation. It does not hurry. It allows Gibson to make mistakes, to pursue wrong turns, to feel the frustration of an investigation that keeps almost coming together. For Morse readers, who are accustomed to a detective who earns his conclusions, this will feel exactly right.

If Morse is one of your touchstones in crime fiction, The Long Game deserves a place on that shelf.

[Get The Long Game on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of The Long Game and the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.