10 August 2023.
ISBN:978-1-399-70760-2 (HB)
Set in Bombay, 1950, a country still struggling to find its feet after independence, the story opens the day after the Supreme Court has turned down James Whitby’s appeal against his sentence of death for the murder of prominent lawyer and former Quit India activist Fareed Mazumdar.
It is eleven days to James Whitby’s date with the gallows.
Persis Wadia, India’s first female police inspector, arriving for work at Malabar House is intercepted by Commissioner of Police Amid Shukla and finds herself with a ‘discreet’ assignment to reinvestigate the case. Her starting point is a meeting with the instigator of her mission, Charles Whitby, an Industrialist, and Millionaire. One of the Englishman who had chosen to stay on after independence.
Charles Whitby does not mince his words,
‘You are my last hope. It has taken a great deal of wrangling to secure your services
in this matter. I had hoped for a full-blown investigation by experienced
officers, but beggars it appears cannot be choosers’. Persis ignored the
insult. ‘My son’s life is at stake. You must commit yourself to proving his
innocence’. Persis replies. ‘I will commit myself to uncovering the truth’. He
looked as if she’d bashed him in the face with a tyre iron.
And so, Persis obtains the documents of
the original investigation and begins her investigation. This takes her in several
different directions. Many leading to
dead ends. But one line of enquiry takes her to Calcutta. She felt at home
there, if there was one thing Bombay and
Calcutta had in common it was the mind-boggling chaos that was the hallmark of
both cities’ tarmacked capillaries, where traffic rules were considered a suggestion.
Searching Mazumdar’s apartment, she had
come across a folder with a collection of cuttings detailing a case of two murders
for which Calcutta gangster Azizur Rahman was charged, and whom Mazumdar
defended many years ago, and which had stirred up much controversy at the time.
With help from her friend Archie
Blackfinch, a Scotland Yard criminalist, she discovers a possible link to those
earlier brutal murders to persue. Could this be the catalyst?
Is James Whitby innocent, and if so, who did murder Mazumdar, and can she find any
evidence as the day of his execution draws near.
Persis is an interesting character. We learn of her early life growing up in a small but influential Parsee community. Her once naively imagined India which the Partition riots shattered. But Persis is made of stern stuff. I so loved her directness when at a business reception at Government House, following an invitation to attend from her cousin Darius, now a man rising up the ranks with meteoric speed, she puts deputy chief minister of West Bengal, Saleem Ansari on the spot with a very direct question. A sharp intake of breath all round.
Rich in well-fleshed out characters, this is a
gripping murder mystery. But also, a fascinating look at India at a time of
great upheaval. The book is both tragic
and humorous, which is what life is made up of, but told with subtle wit and immense charm.
The ability to make one laugh and be sad at the same time is the gift of the
true storyteller. An exceptional book, and one which I highly recommend.
------
Reviewer: Lizzie Sirett
Vaseem Khan was born in London in
1973. He studied finance at the London School of Economics. He first saw an
elephant lumbering down the middle of the road in 1997 when he arrived in the
city of Mumbai, India to work as a management consultant. This surreal sight
inspired his Baby Ganesh Agency series of 'gritty cosy crime' novels. He
returned to the UK in 2006 and has since worked at University College London
for the Department of Security and Crime Science. Elephants are third on his
list of passions, first and second being great literature and cricket, not
always in that order. His first book The
Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra was a Times Bestseller and an
Amazon Best Debut. The second in the series Perplexing
Theft of The Jewel in The Crown won the 2017 Shamus Award for Best Original
Private Investigator Paperback. The latest book is in his new series Malabar
House is Death of A Lesser God
published 10 August 2023.
http://vaseemkhan.com
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/VaseemKhanUK
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VaseemKhanOfficial/
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