Sammy Rice is a low level scientist working for a government ministry in London at the beginning of the Second World War, when Hitler's bombs were raining down and carpeting the city, reducing large sections to rubble, and wounding, killing and maiming thousands of ordinary citizens. Rice's life has not been an easy one, among other things he has an artifical foot which doesn't fit very well, and when the pain becomes unbearable the only thing he can do is self-medicate with a bottle of whisky, while his long suffering girlfriend Susan, also an employee at the ministry, looks on aghast when he passes out night after night. Rice's life is further complicated by an infiniately byzantine office structure in which the hierarchy is always mysterious and invariably counterproductive. Established by Professor Mair from Oxford, who had been asked to start up a department of working scientists, Rice's ministry has come under attack by an outside council which seems to resent its autonomy. Every day is a little slice of hell. His expertise comes in handy when all over Britain a new, and deadly sort of bomb is spotted lying on the grass lawns of Derbyshire and the rocky beaches of Bath. Children think it it's a toy, they pick it up, and kablooey! So various are the pieces of the shrapnel that forensics trying to piece the bomb back together really has no idea of what one looks like and thus no idea of how to defuse it. Then one day, two bombs are found sitting side by side on the beach, and Sammy summons up his bottle to take the ultimate test of manhood. Balchin thus invented, way back in 1942, both the novel of forensics like CSI, and the novel of backbiting office politics, which we see in shows like OFFICE SPACE or the BBC TV comedy series THE OFFICE by Ricky Gervais. People think of Nigel Balchin as a third rate Graham Greene but he's more of a stylist than Greene, and more adventurous too. It's one of those books that gets under your skin and takes you down with it.