Detective-Superintendent William Bagshaw is concerned about a private detective agency run by an ex-policeman, William Flake, and decides to send in Detective-Sergeant Kitty Armitage undercover to see if the agency is the root cause of a recent spate of blackm… Oh, sorry, I was distracted by that monstrous cover. I’ll get back to that, but in the meantime, try and work out how that could fit into a murder mystery.

Oh yes, Kitty enamours a worker at the firm, Duncan Aley, into recommending her for a job, but once she starts working there, she finds herself strangely charmed by him.

That’s him on the cover, by the way. Just oozes charm, doesn’t he?

Anyway, then someone die and Kitty’s husband Brian leads the investigation – and he’s convinced Aley is the guilty party…

And we’re back to Belton Cobb, my one-time hope of being the next Brian Flynn. I’ve said it before, but I own too many copies of his books to stop collecting him now. Quite a few of them are entertaining, a few are very good. And this one… well, the cover’s the most interesting thing about it.

You see, the scene depicts the aftermath of Kitty discovering what will eventually turn out to be Aley’s alibi, namely that when the victim was killed, he was busy gluing pictures of naked women to the wall behind his desk in the office they shared to annoy her. I have to say, I’ve never read that in a mystery novel before.

This is so dull, mostly concerned with Kitty trying to work out why she is sort-of attracted to Aley, despite the fact that he is an arse. There’s no mystery to follow, with the perpetrator being pulled out of the hat in the final pages, in a way to make the reader of a better book want to flick back to find out who they were, but in this case, just be happy and put the book down having finally finished the bloody thing. It’s only 180 pages long, but I feel a year older. And for those keeping track, Cheviot Burmann, Cobb’s general lead, gets a name check a few times, but doesn’t bother to show up. A shame, as Kitty is pretty annoying and Brian seems not to have any distinguishing personality traits here. One to avoid.

Still, that cover…