Rooksby-le-Soken in East Anglia is in need of a new vicar, as their current one has been found on a classroom floor, apparently shot through the heart. Except there is no bullet in the body and no sign of when the bullet hit the wall, despite the fact that he was clearly killed in the room.

Enter DCI George Masters and Sergeant INSERT-NAME-HERE Green, two officers who, it should be said, don’t exactly get on. But there is far more friction between the various people who live in Rooksby-le-Soken – and each of them, it seems, had a good reason to kill the vicar. But can Masters sort the wheat from the chaff and find out how the vicar was killed – and who did the deed?

You might remember that I reviewed Nobody’s Perfect, the first in the very-long running Masters and Green series. Twenty-six of them in total, and people who have read them do say that the series does get very good. I do wish they would tell me when.

To be fair, this is better than the first one, which was pretty dire. Masters has gained a forename – actually, it did crop up right at the end of the previous book in the signature of a letter that our “hero” wrote – but it’s used exactly once per book in the first four books or so. Better than Green, who doesn’t get named as “Bill” until book twelve! The female characters are treated slightly better here than in Nobody’s Perfect, although Masters is still lusting after a suspect from the first book and ends up doing the same here in the final chapter. And the animosity between Masters and Green doesn’t really seem to go anywhere, and unlike, say, Dalziel and Pascoe, it’s not entertaining…

The first two thirds of the book just felt… flat. Grey. Not dull, per se, just not desperately interesting. The solution as to what happened is actually quite good – I claim fairly close to enjoying the last couple of chapters, but by this point, as with the first book, I’d lost much interest in the characters. Plot-wise, Clark clearly had talent, but he needed to have characters that the readers care about to make things work.

So, people who have read more of the series – I know you’re out there. Recommend me a title in the series from when it has improved. Clark is in the last chance saloon at the moment, but I’d really like to see what people are talking about.