Fantastic mid 60s whodunit - 1st of the Dover series. Oafish, lazy, cranky large-ish detective with his handsome svelte sidekick sergeant. This is the story of the disappearance of an overweight girl who got around with all the men in the small English town. Lots of great character appearances, but most strong with Dover bumbling and napping his way through the whole thing. Purchased next two in the series and then we'll see. ( )

A house maid, Juliet Rugg, working for Sir John Counter at Irlam Old Hall has gone missing. The local police of Creed invite Scotland Yard to the case. They send Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover and Sergeant Charles MacGregor to investigate her disappearance. Motive and opportunity seem to be difficult to discover among the possible suspects.
Dover is not a likeable character and is not meant to be, always speaking his mind not caring who he upsets. But somehow with a lot of help from MacGregor the case gets solved.
Overall an enjoyable mystery though would Dover's overthetop character get too tiresome
Originally written in 1964
A NetGalley Book
( )

A new series for me. Maybe.

Dover is an unusually unattractive and rather unlikable detective here. A young woman goes missing and Dover’s boss at Scotland Yard uses her disappearance as a beautiful reason to ship off his least favorite detective (and probably send him on a wild goose chase as well).

Dover, of course, is furious but needs must...Off he goes with his long-suffering sergeant in tow. Somehow the case turns out to more than anyone thought, and Dover manages to fit together the clues and actually dove the case.

I found myself liking the old...detective, and have signed on for the next in the series. I can tell, though, that I’m going to leave some time between each book, so I hope I’ll escape being bored or fatally irritated by this odd main character. ( )

This was an OK book but it didn't make me want to read any other books in the series. The Inspector was a truly miserable individual, which I think was meant to be funny. There some interesting characters in the book and the mystery was a decent one. I didn't have a problem finishing it but that was it. ( )

Wilfred Dover doesn't want to investigate a missing servant girl in Creedshire. After hearing that the girl was a slut, he at first believes that she's just run off with her latest boyfriend. But the fact that she weighs sixteen stone makes a difference - no one that large could hide for very long.

Once he's convinced - with the help of his Detective Sergeant MacGregor - that something has truly happened to her, he's also convinced that someone in the upper class of people living on an estate (converted into single homes now) had something to do with it. It's his job to find out what that is, even if he has to get up once in a while to do so...

Having loved Colin Watson's series, I was hoping that this series would be similar, but I was heavily disappointed. Dover comes off as lazy, overweight, irritable, intolerant of others, and badgers everyone about everything. He takes his sergeant's theories as his own and when his ideas don't pan out, he insists they were his sergeant's. I think this is meant to be funny, but it's not. Also, every character (except the sergeant) in the book is unlikable. From the elderly man to the traveling salesman. Not a one of them seem to have anything that makes one feel sorry for them.

When the ending comes and the murderer is revealed, it's rather unsatisfying. You have no reason at all for the girl to be murdered, in my opinion. This should have been fleshed out more, instead of leaving the reader hanging. Sorry, but I'm not interested in reading any more in this series. Do yourself a favor and pick up Mr. Watson's excellent DI series. ( )