The Burning Grounds
A Novel
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- USD 16.99
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- USD 16.99
Publisher Description
Award-winning crime novelist Abir Mukherjee returns to his brilliant mystery series set in late-1920s Calcutta, as Sam Wyndham and Surendranath Banerjee must reunite to solve a high profile murder and disappearance.
In The Burning Ghats of Calcutta, where the dead are laid to rest, a man is found murdered, his throat cut from ear to ear.
The body is that of a popular philanthropist and patron of the arts. A man, who was, by all accounts, beloved by all. So what could possibly be the motive for murder? Though out of favour with the Imperial Police Force, Detective Sam Wyndham is assigned to the case, and finds himself thrust into the glamorous world of cinema when his investigation leads him to a film the victim was funding.
Meanwhile Sam's former colleague, Surendranath Banerjee, recently returned from Europe after three years running from the fallout of his last case, is searching for a vanished photographer, one of the first women in the profession. When he discovers the missing woman is somehow linked to Sam's murder investigation, the two men are forced to work together once again—but will Wyndham and Banerjee be able to put their differences aside to solve the case?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mukherjee's talent for elevating genre tropes suffuses the stellar fifth installment of his 1920s-set Wyndham and Banerjee mystery series (after The Shadows of Men). It's been three years since British detective Sam Wyndham helped his onetime partner, Indian investigator Surendranath Banerjee, flee India after being falsely accused of attempted murder. The men have since fallen out of touch, owing in part to the painful dissolutions of their respective romantic relationships. They reunite, however, when wealthy British philanthropist J.P. Millick is found with his windpipe slit in an area of Calcutta used to build funeral pyres. Though Wyndham strained relationships with his colleagues on the Imperial Police Force after he helped Banerjee flee prosecution, military intelligence chief Dawson puts him in charge of investigating Millick's death and lures Banerjee back into the fold with a promise to track down his missing cousin, Dolly, if he cooperates. Mukherjee depicts the former partners' uneasy reunion with tenderness while peppering the core whodunit plot with a string of ingenious red herrings. It's another high-water mark for a series full of them.
