Marilyn's Mystery Reads

What a delight to welcome back two of my favorite characters, Sam Wyndham and Surendranath Banerjee, after a five year absence.

Suren has just returned to his home city of Calcutta after a three-year exile in Europe.  He went there after being falsely accused of the crimes of attempted murder and sedition; Sam, a detective in the Imperial Police Force in Calcutta, helped clear him, and now they are tentatively working on restoring their previous friendship and working relationship.

One of the city’s most famous and admired men, Jogendra Prasad Mullick, JP to his friends, is found murdered, a three inch incision across his throat.  JP was renowned as a businessman, a philanthropist, and a patron of the arts.  Who would want to kill this man and leave his body by the burning ghats of the funeral pyres of the Hooghly River?

Sam is the first detective on the scene, but he fears he will soon be replaced as he is out of favor with the authorities due in part to his help in allowing Suren to escape the authorities three years earlier.  Much to his surprise, however, he’s allowed to head the investigation with the proviso “don’t ball this up.”

Sam receives a second surprise when Suren comes to the apartment they had shared before the latter’s escape to Europe.  A cousin of Suren’s, Sushmita Chatterjee, better known as Dolly, has disappeared, and her parents are frantic.  The police are dismissive when her father goes to the station, saying she had probably run away with a man, but Suren tells Sam that Dolly never would have done that.  He asks for Sam’s help, and despite the latter’s reluctance to get involved, he and Suren go to the photography space that is Dolly’s place of business.

When they arrive it’s obvious that it’s been ransacked: furniture upended, cabinets smashed, and photographic supplies and negatives strewn all over the room.  Then a bottle is thrown through the window, and two petrol bombs set the studio ablaze.  The two men manage to escape, but so does a suspicious character Sam sees running away.

Suren begins his investigation into his cousin’s disappearance.  When he questions Mou, her friend and assistant in the photography studio, he learns that a day earlier she had been attacked there by a man looking for Dolly.  Mou tells Suren she feared for her life, and Suren feels certain that the man who threatened Mou is the same man who threw the petrol bombs through the window when he and Sam were there.

The two cases, seemingly unrelated, prove to be connected.  And Suren’s and Sam’s romantic relationships, Suren’s with a French woman he left behind in Paris and Sam’s off-again/on-again relationship with Annie Grant, plus his new infatuation with a movie star visiting Calcutta, combine to make everything more complicated and finding the solution to JP’s murder and Dolly’s disappearance more difficult.

As always, Abir Mukherjee has written a fascinating story of two very different men–Sam, an Englishman who has been trying to leave his tragic history behind him, and Suren, a Bengali caught in between two cultures, the British and the Indian.  Besides these two characters, the city of Calcutta in the 1920s looms large in the novel.

You can read more about the author at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.