Product details
- ISBN 9781399747851
- Weight: 540g
- Dimensions: 156 x 236mm
- Publication Date: 22 Jan 2026
- Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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India, 1951. After wilfully ignoring orders, Persis Wadia, India's first female police detective, is exiled from Bombay to the wild and mountainous Naga Hills District. As India's first post-Independence election looms, and tensions rise across the country, Persis finds herself banished to the Hotel Victoria, a crumbling colonial-era relic, her career in tatters.
But when a prominent politician is murdered in his locked room at the Victoria, his head missing, she is thrust back into the fray. Is the murderer one of the foreigners staying at the hotel or an insurgent from the surrounding jungle? As the political situation threatens to explode, Persis has only days to stop a killer operating at the very edge of darkness...
The sixth rip-roaring thriller in the award-winning Malabar House series and a perfect entry point for new readers.
'Persis Wadia, denizen of India's own Slough House - Malabar House in Bombay - has been further sidelined. She is far from Bombay in the remote Naga Hills, an area of rebels and lawlessness which may just swallow her whole. Persis is a brilliant creation ... With a satisfying backdrop of little-known aspects of newly independent India's history and the ever-present tension with the remaining British colonists, this is a richly satisfying book at many levels' ALIS HAWKINS
Vaseem Khan is the author of several award-winning crime series including the Baby Ganesh Agency adventures, set in modern Mumbai, and the Malabar House historical crime novels, set in 1950s Bombay.
His first book, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, was selected by the Sunday Times as one of the 40 best crime novels published in 2015-2020, and has been translated into 17 languages. Midnight at Malabar House, the first in the Malabar House series, won the Crime Writers' Association Historical Dagger.
Vaseem has won numerous awards for his work, including, most recently, the Fingerprint Award for Historical Crime Novel of the Year for City of Destruction, the fifth in the Malabar House series. Vaseem is also the author of The Girl in Cell A, a psychological thriller set in small town America, and Quantum of Menace, the first in a series featuring Q from the world of James Bond.
