Series: The Malabar House Series

'The leading character is the deftly drawn Persis Wadia, the country's first female detective. She's a wonderful creation and this is a hugely enjoyable book' — Ann Cleeves 'This is historical crime fiction at its best - a compelling mix of social insight and complex plotting with a thoroughly engaging heroine. A highly promising new series' — Mail on Sunday...

A priceless manuscript. A missing scholar. A trail of riddles. Bombay, 1950 For over a century, one of the world's great treasures, a six-hundred-year-old copy of Dante's The Divine Comedy, has been safely housed at Bombay's Asiatic Society. But when it vanishes, together with the man charged with its care, British scholar and war hero, John Healy, the case lands...

India, 1951. After wilfully ignoring orders from her superiors, Persis Wadia, India's first female police detective, has been exiled from Bombay to the wild and mountainous state of Nagaland. As India's first post-Independence election looms, and tensions rise across the country, Persis finds herself banished to the Victoria Hotel, a crumbling colonial-era relic, her career in ruins. But when a...