Adam Huth, the chairman of Barugt Pharmaceutical, is dead in this office, a victim of an overdose of drugs. Enter DCI Masters and Inspector Green of Scotland Yard, and it soon becomes apparent that the overdose was not self-administered. But a company  dedicated to producing pharmaceuticals carefully documents where every single grain goes – so where did the drugs come from? And with eight hundred employees, the suspect list is rather long…

Except for the slight problem that Adam Huth was a popular boss, with nobody having a bad word to say about him. So what motive could anyone have for his murder? And is assigning a pair of officers onto the case who can’t stand each other really the best plan to solve it?

There are twenty-seven books in the Masters and Green series, written between 1969 and 1984. They are all available from Joffe Books as ebook reprints, including two compilations comprising the complete series available for an absolute pittance. When I found out that my book group was going to look at the second title, Death After Evensong, in a few months’ time, so as I happened to have already picked up the Books 1-13 compilation, I thought I’d take a look at the first one.

There’s a really funny foreword to the reprint, reminding readers that the book was written in a time before mobile phones and DNA testing. It doesn’t mention anything else, so there’s an hilarious sentence about being surprised that people still smoke cigarettes after the cancer “scare” but that cigars were necessary as people couldn’t all bring pipes to work. And there’s some attitude issues too…

I think, given the longevity of the series, there must be some development between the characters – one website I’ve seen lists Green as the DCI so maybe there’s something there. But there’s nothing on display here. Masters and Green – no forenames, but not in a Morse-way – don’t like each other. He’s been fast-tracked, he’s been in his job for years… and that’s it. Masters does most of the work here. Green grumbles a bit. End of story. There’s no “hurrah, we may be different but we work well together” or any grudging respect a la Dalziel and Pascoe, just a maintenance of the status quo. Neither gets any real personality, apart from Masters first (and often repeated) game of Sh*g, Marry, Kill with any female characters he meets.

At the heart of this, there is a pretty-well-plotted whodunnit, but it’s hampered by uninteresting characters, conversation after conversation without incident and an incredibly dull setting. There’s a little bit of interesting stuff right at the end with a couple of the suspects…

But yes, this bored me rigid. There’s no way a series of twenty-seven books like this would be remotely successful (unless I’m vastly missing something). There’s no sense of the humour of the aforementioned Dalziel and Pascoe, no sense of camaraderie…

Let’s hope that the second book, where we at least learn Masters’ forename – George – steps things up a gear.