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Sam Wyndham is a British detective based in Calcutta in the 1920s. Surrendranath Bannerji is his Bengali side-kick and (since this is a days of the Raj novel) his subordinate.

It's the fifth of the series featuring these two men. By now, if you've read all the other books in the series, you'll know what to expect. If you've not, and this is your first dip into their world, you'll probably not take long to work out how things are. Actually, if you know the previous books, you might notice more what's missing than what's the same. Perhaps the most prominent changes are that Sam's no longer an opium addict and (thank goodness) they've stopped banging on about the 'surrender not' pun on Bannerji's name. The latter of those two topics was getting very tired even by the end of the first book.

The book is set in both Calcutta and Bombay - so if, like me, you know both Kolkata and Mumbai, I think it helps. The pictures in my head are there when they navigate the two cities. I know Mumbai much better than Kolkata though, so the parts of the book set there were more vibrant for me.

A Hindu theologian is killed early in the book and Bannerji is unfortunate to be the first on the scene. Despite being a policeman, he's accused of being the killer. Wyndham needs to find out who really killed the man (and why) in order to clear his friend's name. It's not always clear who the bad guys are in this one, with attacks and connivance coming at the pair from multiple directions.

Being so far from Calcutta, Wyndham can't rely on the help of his wealthy friend Miss Grant, but fear not, she has friends everywhere, and passes Sam and Surrendranath over to her friend, a wealthy Parsee lady who fulfils Miss Grant's normal role of lending the boys her car, her money, and her (superior) intellect to help their case.

There are times when I found Wyndham's ignorance of Bombay quite surprising - for example, when he thinks that Haji Ali is a person (not a famous mosque on a causeway), but I guess there wasn't the level of cross-country communication 100 years ago.

I like these two. I like that the opium is gone, that Bannerji is treated better by Wyndham, and that the case they are solving is multi dimensional.

I'm a little worried about whether this is the end of the line. I believe it was published in 2021. I hope there's more still to come. I recently read Abir Mukherjee's new book set in the USA and found it to be entirely competent but completely forgettable and I hope he'll be back to set more books in India - whether the 20th or 21st Century, I don't mind.