India in 1921, although still under colonial rule, is inexorably slipping out of the hands of its erstwhile British masters, as more and more Indians of all castes rally to the Independence movement of Mahatma Ghandi and its nonviolent noncooperation resistance.
Inspector Sam Wyndham of the British Imperial Police is also losing his battle with the opium addiction that is his legacy from the physical and mental injuries he suffered in the Great War. He spends more and more nights stupefying himself in Calcutta's opium dens, and his days desperately trying to carry on with his duties while his life goes to pieces.
When Sam and his loyal sergeant "Surrender-not" Banerjee are assigned to investigate the grisly murder of a native nurse at the military hospital at Barrackpore, he is stunned at his first sight of the body. The woman has been stabbed twice in the chest, and both her eyes gouged out. Just the night before, Sam saw the body of a Chinese man with exactly the same mutilations. Unfortunately Sam can't tell his superiors about the first corpse, because he stumbled over it as he was escaping from a police raid on an opium den; revealing his presence there would expose his addiction and cost him his job.
With no one he can trust except Surrender-Not, Sam must keep his personal demons from spiraling out of control long enough to solve this deadly riddle. And, if that's not enough, the pending visit of the Prince of Wales to dedicate the Victoria Monument in Calcutta is sparking massive nonviolent demonstrations by the Mahatma's Congress Party, in support of Indian independence. The government is reactig to the demonstrations with threats of violent retaliation, and Surrender-not is suffering from conflicting loyalties to his job and his people.
A well-plotted murder mystery with great characters, set during a crucial period of Anglo-Indian history, with consequences that are still playing out in the relations between West and East.
The child of Indian immigrants, Abit Mukherjee grew up in western Scotland, and discovered crime fiction in his teens. He worked for some years in financial services in London, and wrote in his spare time. His first novel in the Wyndham/Banerjee series, A Rising Man, won the Harvill Secker/Daily Telegraph crime writing competition. On the strength of that he got a contract with a book publisher, and has gone on to publish two more critically acclaimed novels in the series, A Necessary Evil and Smoke and Ashes. A fourth novel featuring Sam Wyndham and Surrender-not Banerjee, Death in the East, is scheduled for release next year.
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