Lucknow Shadows of Empire

The greatest tragedy of Queen Victoria’s reign...was also the greatest British Raj murder mystery.


...for young Henry Booth. His mother died when more than one-hundred women and children were hacked to pieces with meat cleavers by the rebel forces of the Great Indian Mutiny. So starts the greatest murder mystery of the British Raj. This event, which transformed an empire, left deep scars in Henry’s character. 

     Years after the slaughter, Henry receives his mother’s journal from India and the young Oxford student finds himself suddenly entangled in his mother’s past, a past he never suspected, a past which threatens his own life in the present. 

     While Henry tries to elude the dangers that confront him, he comes to know his mother, not through the idealized memories of a seven year old child, the age when he last saw her, but through her journal. The journal teaches Henry that his Victorian assumptions about the nature of women are utterly false. What he learns from his mother’s private thoughts allows him to give up the myth of male supremacy for a passionate relationship with a young Indian woman who has been trained as a dancer, musician, poet and courtesan.

     Shadows of Empire is a love story of the British Raj and murder mystery that takes place in the exotic settings of Lucknow, northern India, and Victorian London. In addition to the drama of two interwoven cultures, and two story lines of past and present, the reader will also encounter the remarkable subculture of the Lucknow courtesans, highly skilled  artists who were leaders of  their society and, unlike nearly all other women on the subcontinent, lived their lives without male domination.